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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24005656">Survive the Night</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/reverseblackholeofwords/pseuds/reverseblackholeofwords'>reverseblackholeofwords</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubberSoles19/pseuds/RubberSoles19'>RubberSoles19</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Devil May Care [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>CrankGameplays - Fandom, Five Nights at Freddy's, MatPat - Fandom, NateWantsToBattle - Fandom, Supernatural, markiplier - Fandom, youtube - Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Balloon Boy - Freeform, FNAF!AU, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Markiplier references, Mystery, Possession, Springtrap - Freeform, Visions, srsly so many markiplier references, supernatural!AU</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:34:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>45,276</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24005656</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/reverseblackholeofwords/pseuds/reverseblackholeofwords, https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubberSoles19/pseuds/RubberSoles19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After fending off a spectral speeder to help out Roadhouse owner Rosanna Pansino, the boys, Matthew Patrick and Nathan Smith, return to normal life - or about as normal as it gets for them. But as much as the brothers would like to believe that they have finally escaped William Afton and the darkness that haunts the Freddy Fazbear's Franchise, a new social media craze sweeping the internet might be reawakening something dangerous. However, it might be the darkness haunting their own minds that eventually pushes these brothers to the brink.</p><p>In which: Nate and Matt head off to investigate a Freddy's that is attracting young thrill-seekers who are getting in over their heads, and meet some new "friends" along the way.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Mark Fischbach &amp; Ethan Nestor, Matthew Patrick &amp; Nathan Sharp, Matthew Patrick/Stephanie Patrick, Nathan Sharp &amp; Stephanie Patrick</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Devil May Care [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1646251</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>157</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Introduction</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>Medina, Ohio<br/>October 1999</p><p>Blowing the dark bangs from his eyes, ten-year old Nate chewed his lip and tried to focus on the battle at hand. Every choice he made mattered. Every move determined whether he’d win or lose, and victory was so close he could practically taste it. But somewhere beyond that moment, Nate heard his brother cry out, and a thud sounded from the stage.</p><p>Nate’s head snapped up as the music stopped, and Mrs. Flowers stomped onto the stage right up to where Matt had fallen. His partner, Sloane McGuire, was stamping her foot in her sparkling high heels that all the eighth grade show choir girls wore, glaring daggers like she was barely containing her rage. “Lucas!” Mrs. Flowers shouted, shaking her tiny hands at the boy who had accidentally tripped up Matt. “How many times have I told you to go <em>left</em>, not <em>right</em> after the second verse!”</p><p>Lucas made a mumbled excuse, but Mrs. Flowers didn’t seem to care to hear it. “In case you’ve forgotten, our performance in the Medina Follies is <em>this</em> Friday! If you don’t go home and practice until you’re dancing in your sleep, you will not be part of this choir very much longer, mister!”</p><p>Nate rolled his eyes. It was all empty threats with Mrs. Flowers, especially towards the guys in the show choir, which wasn’t exactly the most popular extracurricular activity among Medina Junior High’s male population. So Nate went back to his Pokemon battle, propping his feet up on the back of the auditorium seat in front of him as he set his mouth just the right way and used Quilava’s Flamethrower against his opponent in his latest gym battle.</p><p>Caught up in the rush of his game, he still heard his brother approaching some time later, but didn’t bother to look up. Matt playfully kicked one of Nate’s legs. “Come on, kid.”</p><p>Still without glancing up at the twelve-old, Nate replied, “Gotta catch ‘em all, pimpleface. Don’t interrupt me now.”</p><p>Matt huffed and tried to snatch the Gameboy out of his brother’s hands. “Come on! I’m starving, and there’s leftovers at home with my name on them!”</p><p>Nate turned to the side, shielding the Gameboy with his body so that Matt couldn’t take it away from him. “Knock it off! I’m almost done, I swear!” Matt sighed deeply, like his brother was asking him to fork over a kidney rather than five more minutes, and he stalked off, probably to talk smack about Lucas Waters with Sloane. When he did, Nate went back to his game, his tongue stuck in the side of his mouth in perfect concentration.</p><p>He was just about to make his final move when something in the corner of his eye caught his attention, a flicker of movement where no one should be standing, just a few seats down from Nate in the row behind him. Nate sat up, spine as stiff as a board, and the little girl with the big blue tears running down her face sobbed.</p><p>Frozen for a moment, he felt himself draw back from her. He could hear his dad’s voice in his head, telling him it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it couldn’t hurt him. Nate set his jaw and finished the battle, looking up from his game every few seconds to glare daggers at the walking nightmare. Her black and white striped sleeves wiped at the gore on her face and only managed to smear it around before she coughed and flickered out of view.</p><p>Nate shoved the Gameboy back into his backpack, ducked his head, and went to find Matthew, hoping the girl would stay gone. His brother was flirting with Sloane, or at least Nate figured he was trying to flirt - and maybe not doing it so well - because Sloane looked very distracted. Matt didn’t notice his brother at first, so Nate cleared his throat.</p><p>“I thought you wanted to go home already.”</p><p>Matt frowned. “I thought you were finishing a gym battle.”</p><p>“I did! Got my next badge, now let’s go.” Nate dug his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, the one that was slowly starting to fit him with each passing year, but Matt figured it would probably fall to pieces before it was actually Nate’s size.</p><p>He recognized his brother’s nervous ticks though, hands buried, eyes on the ground. Matt turned back to Sloane for a moment, but she’d already pulled out her flip phone and started texting someone. “See you tomorrow, Sloane,” he called, and she deigned to wave back.</p><p>Nate wrinkled his nose at her, but Matt turned him around and shoved him in the direction of the door before Nate could think of an appropriate insult to sling at her. “She’s got a stick up her butt,” he commented instead as they left the auditorium.</p><p>“Well, she is the best dancer in the show choir,” Matt sighed somewhat wistfully, and Nate rolled his eyes.</p><p>“Yeah, the show choir. Not exactly a reason to think she’s all that.” He dragged his shoes as they walked, still with his head down so that he wouldn’t see anything he didn’t want to. Sometimes if he ignored the visions long enough, they’d just go away on their own. “Show choir is stupid. They don’t even sing any good songs.”</p><p>“They’re good!” Matt protested, and then with a smirk, “They’re just not the kinds of songs that you like, punk.”</p><p>“Dipstick,” Nate snapped back. He tried to imagine how the show choir might dance to Green Day or the Misfits in their sequin dresses and shiny shoes. That at least brought a smile to his face as he imagined Mrs. Flowers head-banging so hard that her wig came off.</p><p>Pushing through the front doors into the crisp, autumn air, Matthew took a deep breath and sighed. “Stuck up or not, Sloane is really pretty. Her long dark hair…”</p><p>“Her big nose,” Nate added.</p><p>“Her beautiful green eyes…”</p><p>“Those teeth!”</p><p>Matt rolled his eyes again like he knew everything, like Nate was still just a little kid, but Nate was ten years-old now, double digits! And Matt was just a nerd. “You just don’t understand. You’ve never been in love before.” There was that wistful tone again. Nate hated it, the way it made his brother sound like such a sissy.</p><p>They passed the elementary building after leaving the auditorium, and the after-school daycare kids were out on the playground, screaming and laughing and playing. One shrill cry caught Nate’s attention, and his head snapped up. A little boy had fallen from the swingset. He was curled up on the ground cradling one arm, and a girl stood over him, a girl with her arms hanging limp and her head lolling to the side. Her big, dark-rimmed eyes watched him as he walked. Suddenly the boy on the ground at her feet changed, looking like another child crying for help, blood on his face.</p><p>Nate bristled.</p><p>When he did, Matt noticed. “Don’t worry. The teachers will take care of him.” But Nate wasn’t looking at the boy. Matt traced his gaze and realized that Nate was staring at a fixed point above the little boy who was crying. He was seeing something that wasn’t there.</p><p>Matthew didn’t know what Nate saw. Ever since he had found out about monsters, about what John hunted on those trips he brought Nate on, Matt had wondered if there was any connection between those things and the things Nate sometimes saw that no one else could. More often than not, when Nate started seeing things, John took them on a trip very suddenly, and they wouldn’t come back for days.</p><p>Matt had tried to get answers out of Nate once or twice, but the kid usually clammed up, wouldn’t even look his brother in the eye. After the way Matt had reacted when he found out about the monsters in the first place, he really couldn’t blame Nate, but still, he wished he knew if only so he could help.</p><p>Matt knelt down in front of Nate and took his arms. “Hey, kid, look at me, okay? Look at me.” He waved a hand across Nate’s vision. “Earth to Nathan.”</p><p>Slowly, Nate looked down at his brother, eyes haunted and rimmed with tears behind his too-big glasses. Whatever he saw, it scared him. That much Matt knew. Whatever he saw, he hated it, and so Matt hated it, too. “It’s alright,” he told his brother, mimicking the same authoritative voice that John used whenever Nate saw something at home that scared him. “It’s not real.”</p><p>But Nate’s eyes snapped back up as the kid cried louder when one of the teachers picked him up from the ground. Nate could feel blood on his hands, making his sleeves heavy and wet. The stench was overwhelming. He started to shake.</p><p>Matt shook his head. John’s usual method wasn’t working. Nate was starting to breathe hard. The little girl’s head slowly tilted from one side to the other, unnaturally far. Her eyes were bloodshot, and they were staring right at him, right inside of him. She was saying something, warning him about something, but her voice was just that terrible metallic screeching. Nate’s breathing got worse, his chest heaving up and down.</p><p>“Hey,” Matt demanded and gave Nate’s arms a gentle tug. “What are all of Eevee’s evolutions?”</p><p>Nate blinked, and his gaze shifted to Matt again. “Easy,” he muttered through labored breaths, “Vaporeon, Jolteon…” The kid screamed again, and Nate winced, shutting his eyes tight. “F-flareon, Umbreon…” Metal clashing against metal sounded in Nate’s ears, and he clamped his hands tight on either side of his head. Matt grabbed him into a hug, crushing him close to his chest. “It’s loud-” Nate whimpered.</p><p>“Okay, okay, let’s go home.” Matt kept his arm around Nate’s shoulders and led him along. Nate pressed his hands over his ears all the way home, tripping up the front steps of the house and running inside. Once Matt had locked the front door behind them, Nate slowly peeled his fingers away from his head and glanced around. The noise of ripping metal had faded to just a tinny ringing in his ears.</p><p>His fingers were no longer stained with dark red blood, and the little girl was nothing more than a staticky smudge at the corner of his vision.</p><p>He swallowed, his face burning red and wet with tears. “It’s - it’s gone, I think.” Nate flinched out of Matt’s reach and then trudged up the steps in defeat. Matt heard the door to their room open and then slam closed.</p><p>It had never been that bad before, and as much as it scared Nate, it scared Matt, too, seeing his little brother like that. Nate was all but fearless. He could climb trees to the very top branches, dive off the highest diving board at the public pool, even pick fights with kids twice his size if they so much as looked at Matthew the wrong way or ever said a cross word about John. But whatever Nate saw in those visions, whatever he heard, it was bad enough to break him.</p><p>Matt set his backpack down by the door and rushed up the stairs. He found Nate sulking on one of their beanbag chairs with headphones on, listening to the portable CD-player that Mary had gotten him for his birthday. Matt couldn’t tell what the song was, but it was loud enough that he could hear it clear across the room. When he looked at Nate, his brother looked away. When he came closer, Nate scooted the beanbag chair around to face the other way.</p><p>So Matt reached down and pulled one side of the headphones away from Nate’s ear, saying, “You forgot Espeon, the psychic type evolution.”</p><p>“I didn’t forget it,” Nate snapped back and slapped at his brother’s hand. Then tearing the headphones off his ears, Nate huffed. “Just leave me alone.”</p><p>Matt settled down on the second beanbag, picking up a book about the solar system and flipping through it. “Why won’t you tell me about what you see?”</p><p>“Because you’d think I’m a head case.” Nate kicked Matthew’s beanbag.</p><p>“Oh, yeah?” Matt skimmed his eyes over the pages about Saturn. “Says who?”</p><p>Suddenly Nate went quiet for a while, and Matthew looked up from his book a moment to see that he’d pulled his hood over his head to hide his eyes. “Says my dad,” Nate mumbled into the fabric of his black jacket, and Matt set the book aside. “He says I have to keep it a secret so people don’t think there’s something wrong with me.”</p><p>Matt felt something ugly wriggle inside his chest, a growing dislike for John Smith that he hadn’t been able to shake since they’d first arrived. He never mentioned it to anyone, not even his mom, and especially not Nate, but he didn’t like John. He didn’t like the way he yelled at Nate, didn’t like the way that he always won the fights that he and Mary had, didn’t like the way that John entered a room and everyone got quiet. And now he certainly didn’t like the idea that John had told Nate that even his brother might think he was crazy if he told him the truth. It just didn’t seem right for Nate to have to carry that burden alone. So Matt took a deep breath.</p><p>“Musophobia,” Matt said, resting his head back against the beanbag and staring up at the ceiling. He pretended he could glare a hole in the ceiling and that the ceiling was John’s head.</p><p>Nate frowned, glancing up through his bangs. “What does that mean?”</p><p>Matt smiled. “It’s a fear of mice. Mom has musophobia.” Then Matt sat up and wiggled his fingers towards Nate like he was pretending to be a creepy, crawly mouse. Nate rolled his eyes. “Can a mouse kill you?”</p><p>“Probably not-”</p><p>“So, should my mom be afraid of them?”</p><p>“Well-” Nate kicked Matt’s beanbag again, sulking. He knew exactly what Matt was trying to do, but it wouldn’t work. He didn’t care what he said. Nate was a freak, and he knew it. “I don’t know! Nerd!”</p><p>Matt sighed and then rubbed his palms over the knees of his blue jeans. “I have coulrophobia.”</p><p>Nate hung the headphones around his neck so that he could still hear the music without drowning Matt out. “What’s that one? Fear of being cool cause you’re such a nerd?”</p><p>“Fear of clowns.” Matt shuddered at the mere thought. “I hate them even though I know that a regular ole clown at an amusement park probably isn’t going to try to kill me.” He sat up and looked at Nate. “Sometimes, even if you know something isn’t real or isn’t worth being scared over, it can still scare you anyway, and you’re not the only one in the world who’s scared of something.”</p><p>“Well, I don’t see mice or clowns,” Nate muttered while staring very intently at the toes of his sneakers. He hated this. He hated that Matt was right. Most of all he hated that he was so scared still, hated being scared of the things he saw and heard and felt, and scared of what Matt would say if he ever found out. Only his dad understood, and that was because he and Nate were really related. John wouldn’t leave Nate because John was his dad.</p><p>Blood was thicker than water, right?</p><p>“Listen, you don’t have to tell me.” Matt crossed his arms over his knees. His hazel eyes were soft and kind, a lot like Mary’s, and he was a pimpleface and a nerd. But he made Nate feel safe. “I just wish that I could help you, and I think I could help you better if you told me.”</p><p>Nate balled up his fists so tight that he could feel his fingernails starting to prick the skin of his palms. He ground his knuckles into his thighs and then let out a slow breath. “If I tell you, I need you to swear that you won’t let my dad know.”</p><p>“Not let your dad know what?” John asked as he entered the room - without knocking. His eyes scanned from one boy to the other, noting the loud music blaring from Nate’s headphones and the angry color in Matt’s cheeks. “Better be glad we don’t have time to discuss this. Pack your bags, Nathan. We’re going on a trip. Now.”</p><p>Matt sprung to his feet before he’d even really thought about it. “I want to go, too.”</p><p>John paused in the doorway, and there was something between disdain and amusement in his eyes. “Oh, do you? Well, sorry, Matthew, but this is…”</p><p>“A father-son trip, right?” Matt tried not to grind his teeth together at what he was about to say, but he figured he had no choice. “Well, last I checked you’re the closest thing to a father I have, and I’m tired of getting left behind.”</p><p>“You want to go hunting?” John asked, as much of a dare as it was a question. He knew that Matthew had found his closet and his book. It had been obvious enough when he wouldn’t sleep for a week, when Mary finally got the answer out of him and had come straight to John. Maybe part of him had hoped that Matt would ask to come along just so he could show him how privileged he really was, show the little know-it-all just how much he had to learn. So instead of arguing, John smiled. “Of course you can come, Matthew. Only hurry up. We need to be leaving in ten.”</p><p>The door shut with a bang behind John, and both boys waited a few moments to hear his footsteps retreat down the hall before Nate shot a glare up at his older brother. “That was stupid. You don’t want to come.” He got up and pulled his old bag out from under his bed. It was still packed with a few supplies. It always was. “What about the Medina Follies on Friday? We probably won’t be back in time.”</p><p>“Who cares about the Follies?” Matt fished around in the closet for a bag that he could use and started throwing clothes inside. “Besides, Sloane can’t quit stepping on my feet every five seconds, so I’ll be better off with you guys.”</p><p>Nate scoffed as he packed. He knew for sure that Matt wouldn’t be better off going on a hunt. He also knew that Matt had practiced hours to get ready for the Follies, not just at school with the others either, but part of him was dizzy with relief. He wouldn’t have to be alone on the road with his dad and the hallucinations, after all. He zipped up his bag, tugging the strap onto his shoulder as he turned back to Matt. “What do you call a fear of getting your face chewed off by a werewolf?”</p><p>Matt snorted. “I don’t think there’s a word for that.” Then glancing up at Nate, he asked, “Are we going to be hunting a werewolf?”</p><p>Nate shrugged his shoulders, a grin sprouting across his face. “Guess we’ll have to find out, huh, genius?”</p><p>Before Matt could answer, John banged his fist against the door. “Downstairs! Now!” And they grabbed the last of their things, kicked on their shoes, and raced out of the room after him.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Get a Job, You Bum</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Soooooo, we were going to publish a one-shot last week introducing our newest character, but we both needed a mental break from uploads so that didn't happen. Might retcon it later but I don't think it will throw anything off too much.</p><p>Enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>[<a href="https://youtu.be/DHLcahXaiMc">Nate</a>]</p><p>Los Angeles, California<br/>April, 2011</p><p>Matt tossed in his sleep - a noise of quiet protest, a hand reaching for something that wasn’t there, brow creased, mouth curled in pain. The blanket he tangled himself in hung over the edge of the futon, and the scratched-up coffee table that sat nearby was covered in papers, mugs half-full of forgotten coffee, the old laptop plugged into the wall, its LED blinking like a single silver eye in the darkness of the room.</p><p>Suddenly, Matt sat up with a gasp, like something was burning against his chest, like something had wrapped its icy fingers around his neck. Leaning his elbows onto his knees, he pressed the heels of his hands to either side of his head in an attempt to massage away the pain. A white and brown cat - their second rescue within the last month since the other was off on another hunt - hopped up onto the futon beside him, making a noise of confusion as he butted his head into Matthew’s arm.</p><p>Matt looked up, a smile tugging on his lips. “Oh hey, Skip! Did I scare you?” He scratched behind the cat’s ears and sighed. When his new therapist recommended getting a pet that melt help calm Matt's anxiety, he'd been skeptical at best, but Skip seemed to have a sixth sense for when someone needed comforting. And he wasn't above sitting on Matt's laptop in order to get attention. “I’m sorry, bud.” Then swinging his legs around, Matthew got up and tip-toed to the door to the bedroom. He peered inside.</p><p>The room was painted blue from the streetlights outside, illuminating a part of Stephanie’s face where she slept soundly. Matt leaned his head against the doorframe, watching her for a moment and letting the sight of her there, peaceful and safe, comfort him. He’d taken to sleeping on the futon lately because of the... He turned back and sat down again. At least he hadn’t woken her up this time.</p><p>Petting Skip with one hand, Matt grabbed his phone with the other to check the time. It was nearly three in the morning. Surely he was asleep by now, Matthew thought to himself, but the thought of shutting his eyes again made him shudder. So instead, Matt grabbed his hoodie from the foot of the futon and pulled it on over his head as he shuffled out the door. Out on the balcony overlooking a picturesque empty lot full of garbage and overgrown weeds, Matt dialed his brother’s number.</p><p><em>“Go for broke,”</em> came the muffled reply after just one ring.</p><p>Of course Nate was still awake. Matthew gave a small, grateful smile. “Hey, it’s me.”</p><p><em>“What’s up, big brother?”</em> Matt could hear Nate’s grin. <em>“Steph stick you in the doghouse again? Or wait, you got that cat now, right? Do cats get their own houses? You should get your cat a house, Matt. That’s just racist.”</em></p><p>Matt giggled quietly as he sagged against the rusted iron railing. Then, taking a deep breath, he admitted, “It - uh - it happened again.” He rubbed at the crease in his brow. “Bad as usual.”</p><p>There was movement on the other end of the phone, and Nate replied, <em>“I’ll be there by breakfast.”</em></p><p>“No - Nate!” Matt paced away from the railing, not that the balcony afforded much room for pacing. “There’s no need. You’re on a hunt. You can’t just ditch Ro like that. She was just starting to like you again.”</p><p><em>“Matt, this is the third nightmare just this week.”</em> Nate’s voice dropped, as if he could sense Matthew’s hesitation and his guilt, even through the phone. <em>“Ro will forgive me… again, especially if it’s for you, and I’ll call someone else to cover the case. Ryan, maybe - never liked that guy.”</em></p><p>Matt’s stomach turned. He hated to be the reason to pull Nate away from a job, especially not when it was a favor to Ro. She'd done so much to help them get back on their feet. “I’m serious, okay? Don’t go anywhere. You’ve got to finish the job - saving people, hunting things, all that jazz.” He swallowed as the cool night air washed over his sweaty skin in a sudden breeze and made him shiver. “They’re just dreams, nothing I can’t handle.”</p><p>Nate paused, and the noise stopped. <em>“Yeah, and that’s why you’re on the phone with me right now instead of snuggled up in bed with Steph, right?”</em> Sighing, Nate went back to throwing his things into his duffel bag. <em>“Dude, I’ve dealt with ‘nothing’ my entire life, and guess what, it’s never just ‘nothing.’ I told you I’d help you handle this, and I’m heading your way to do just that. Okay?”</em></p><p>His voice choked - thinking how he was such a burden - Matt shook his head. “Nate-”</p><p><em>“Sorry, can’t hear you! I’m already out the door!”</em> Matt did hear a door slam shut, and Nate jangled his keys. <em>“I like my eggs fluffy with whole grain toast, thanks.”</em></p><p>Despite himself, Matt smirked and relaxed against the railing again. “Thank you.” He hung up and dropped his phone into the pocket of his hoodie before reaching up to rub at the fresh scar along his collar bone as it burned like an infection beneath his skin.</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>As morning light filled up the tiny apartment, Matthew sat at the kitchenette’s counter and stared out the window, his hands wrapped around yet another mug of forgotten coffee. The dingy oven hummed, smelling faintly of toasting bread, and the refrigerator droned on. Both filled the room with a constant white noise as Matt’s mind drifted far away.</p><p>A knock at the front door drew Stephanie, wearing a blouse and dress pants, from the bedroom to answer it. When she opened the door, Nate beamed down at her, all charm and dimples in his leather jacket and ripped jeans, his backpack slung over one shoulder. “Cordy!”</p><p>“Nate!” Steph hugged him tight, glad to see him after even the few weeks he’d been away. Of course, when they’d first met - and boy had that been a rough first impression - Steph never imagined she could miss him so much, but near death experiences and a healthy fear of the supernatural tended to bring people together like that.</p><p>Skip, curious about this strange newcomer, leaped onto the arm of the futon and flicked his tail unhappily. “Ah, cat!” Nate called and knelt beside Skip, raising the back of his hand for the cat to sniff. Hesitantly, Skip inspected this odd human before finally sitting and allowing Nate to pet him, purring like a little lawnmower.</p><p>“Wow, Skip’s usually never that calm around new people,” Steph said with a surprised chuckle. “He must like you.”</p><p>“Are you kidding?” Nate snorted as he scratched underneath Skip’s chin and grinned up at Stephanie, obviously quite proud of himself. “Everybody likes me!”</p><p>Behind them, Matt slowly rose from his seat in the kitchen and shuffled in, barely mustering a smile. “Speak for yourself. I can’t stand you.”</p><p>Nate looked up at him as Skip jumped down to brush against Matt’s legs. “You look terrible.”</p><p>“At least I don’t look like you,” Matt snapped back, a smirk coming a little easier as Nate winked up at him. “Come on. The toast is going to burn.”</p><p>In the kitchen, Stephanie took down a chipped mug with the words “Life Begins at 50” printed on it from the shelf above the sink. “Coffee?” she offered over her shoulder to Nate.</p><p>Nate placed his palms together in front of him and bowed slightly when she offered it to him, taking the mug like it was liquid gold. “Yes, please, I’ve been driving all night.” As he sat on one of the stools lined along the short length of counter reserved for eating, Nate cleared his throat. “So, how’s the new job?”</p><p>“Same job, different building,” Steph said as she poured herself some coffee, too. “More hours, but I’m making more at least.” She glanced down at the watch on her wrist, sighing. “Which reminds me, I’ve got to finish getting ready.”</p><p>While Matt slipped in behind her to take the tray of toast from the oven, Steph pressed a kiss to Nate’s forehead and disappeared back into the bedroom. Once he’d loaded the toast onto one plate, Matt slid it across the counter to Nate and brought his laptop from the cramped living room area. Nate crunched happily for a few moments before inclining his head towards the screen. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”</p><p>“Um, yeah, here.” Matt scratched his head as he turned the laptop around so that Nate could see what he’d been researching for the last couple of days. It was a series of crudely drawn sigils and runes, all of them as foreign to Nate as chicken-scratch.</p><p>“Huh.”</p><p>“It’s the symbols from that basement storage place,” Matt said as if it didn't conjure a hundred different traumatizing memories for the both of them. He tapped his pen on an open notebook where he’d repeatedly drawn the sigils with slight variations. “I’ve been trying to remember what they looked like so that I can figure out what they mean.”</p><p>Nate nodded in silence, a dark sort of disappointment in his eyes.</p><p>Matt, almost self-conscious, pulled the notebook closer to himself and frowned down at it. “Had a whole week to study them up close and personal, of course, but it was dark. And I was… distracted most of the time.” He tried to hide the shudder that ran down his spine, chill bumps rising on his arms and the back of his neck the more he thought about that week. “Um, but the ones I have managed to recreate all have a common theme: they’re used in black magic.”</p><p>Nate shrugged even if his shoulders were getting tighter the longer Matt talked about this. “Well, Afton was some kind of witch. Course it was black magic.”</p><p>Matt traced his thumb underneath his bottom lip and reached for his cup of coffee. “Sure, that’s what I thought too, but it’s a little more complicated than that.” As he sipped the lukewarm coffee, Matt tapped the screen of the laptop for Nate to look at some of his typed notes. “While I haven’t been able to find the exact meanings, I know some of these - these few right here - these are the old Alchemy symbols pertaining to the soul. Mercury, fire, I mean - they aren’t exact, but that’s the closest match I could find. It’s a start.”</p><p>Nate sipped his coffee thoughtfully, both eyebrows raised. “Well sure, it’s not unheard of for the occult to sprinkle in a little Alchemy for kicks and giggles.” He leaned closer. “But you said - the soul?”</p><p>Matt raised a hand like he knew that Nate was thinking this theory was stretching it a bit. “I know, I wasn’t sure of it myself, but these five symbols here - these are the ones I can pretty confidently remember. They are all from various equations I’ve seen throughout a couple hundred - almost a thousand - years of alchemy and black magic history, but not all from the same sources.” He clicked through a few different tabs he had open - screenshots of ancient texts, research papers on dead languages, pictures of hieroglyphs carved into stone.</p><p>“Actually, they’re from tons of different sources across tons of different legends and myths. Plus, I’ve never seen more than two of them together at a single time, even throughout all this history.” Matt started chewing his lip as he paused. “If Afton knew how to use these and how to use them well enough to combine them in a way I haven’t been able to find anywhere else, he was a lot more powerful than we initially thought.”</p><p>Nate watched Matthew, and Matthew watched Nate watching him until Nate finally asked, “How many cups of coffee have you had today?”</p><p>“Nate, I remember these.”</p><p>“I know.” Nate shifted awkwardly and pulled the crust off his toast in little chunks. “You said yourself you were down there for a week.” Guilt took a stab at Nate's ribs, and he winced.</p><p>Matt held up the notebook, tapping the page with the sigils. “No, I mean, I’m still seeing these. These five symbols.”</p><p>Nate sat back, blinking slowly. “Oh.”</p><p>Matt dropped his gaze again, sheepishly. He knew exactly how crazy he sounded, exactly how unhinged he must look after several nights without sleep and too many days shut away in this apartment. “The nightmares I’ve been having, they are the same visions that Afton put into my head during that week. I told you about them.”</p><p>“Sure,” Nate said, nodding, “your friends and family abandon you, and you’re helpless to save them or bring them back. It’s all the ‘Greatest Hits’ from Hell.”</p><p>“Well, they’ve come back as nightmares, but these - these marks, they're in them now. Everywhere, like they’re burned inside my brain." His fingers trembled as he spoke, his voice almost feverish, and Nate was almost certain his big brother was going to blow a fuse. "It's like they're the source of it all. Only they weren’t there before, but it’s the only part of the visions that has changed.” Matt rubbed a hand through his hair, his bangs flopping down over his eyes. He was in desperate need of a haircut and a good long walk in the sun. “Every other single detail is exactly the same.”</p><p>Nate felt another pang in his chest. “Maybe it’s the trauma, dude. These things happen.”</p><p>Finally snapping, Matt slammed his hands onto the counter, stood from his stool, and paced away from the counter. Nate didn’t flinch. “No! No, Afton used those sigils to break me down, make me easier to feed on. If they were trauma, they would have happened immediately after you pulled me out, right? Not now, not weeks later.” It had to mean something. It all had to mean something, and it was up to Matt to find the answers. And he could do it. He was the only one that could do it because he was the only one who had spent a whole week with Afton up close and personal.</p><p>Calmly, Nate continued to pinch off chunks of crust. “I don’t know, man, brains are weird, funky, gooey things. There’s no prescription for what you went through.” He stopped fiddling for a moment and looked up at his older brother who looked so tired Nate wasn’t sure how he was even still standing. “This could be perfectly... you know... normal. Plus, you’ve been kind of... well, they say what you’re stressed about in life shows up in your dreams.”</p><p>Matt gave him a look, a “Really?” look, and Nate shrugged helplessly. They both knew the “logical one” wasn’t a slot he fit into very well. Then Matt quickly sat back down next to his brother, scooting closer to him wearily. Nate straightened, sensing there was more. “And here comes the bad news.”</p><p>“I think my dreams,” Matt began slowly, “the fact that they have returned, what they are - is directly tied to your hallucinations and the fact that they’ve returned.” Nate shot Matt a death glare - a warning not to rub salt into that particular wound glare - but Matt held his gaze steadily. “I don’t want to speculate-”</p><p>“Then don’t.” Nate’s voice was dangerous, the look in his eyes even more so. Matt knew he was on thin ice, but before he could continue, Steph entered the room again with her makeup done and her phone in her hand.</p><p>She set it down on the counter in front of Nate and hit "play" on the video she'd pulled up. Nate frowned as he looked down at it, setting his toast aside to pick up the phone and study the screen more closely. It was a compilation of other short videos, all of them of kids with their phone cameras in an all-too-familiar location, chanting in front of dusty, cracked mirrors as if trying to summon a ghost. In almost every video, something would eventually go bump, and the footage would cut suddenly as the kids ran away screaming from the building.</p><p>When the compilation ended, Nate dropped the phone and took a sip of his coffee before sighing and asking, “Fair warning: YouTube ad revenue isn’t all that great. Just in case you wanted to get into the business yourselves.”</p><p>Stephanie sat down on Nate’s other side. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for anything interesting related to Freddy’s, in case it’s Afton.”</p><p>“But it’s not,” Nate insisted, his hands curling into fists on the countertop, his shoulders tensing even more.</p><p>“And lo and behold,” Steph continued gently, “there’s an entire internet trend about sneaking into old Freddy’s locations and trying to summon some ‘vengeful spirit.’ Most locations don’t offer anything - only a few cheap editing tricks on the kids’ parts - but this one has tons of videos of kids all claiming that it’s really haunted and tons of different ghosts and things being spotted.” Stephanie took the phone back. She knew what this meant to Nate, to both of them, and she wouldn't turn them towards something if she didn't think that it meant something. “I’ve looked them over myself. None of the ones from this location look edited.”</p><p>“And vengeful spirits are sort of Afton’s motif,” Matt added.</p><p>“Were, they <em>were</em> his thing.” Nate was hunched over the counter now, his head hung slightly as he avoided their eye contact. Why were they insisting that this was still a problem when he was trying so hard to move on? Why couldn’t they just let it go? “Besides, these kids don’t know the difference between a vengeful spirit and a fart in the wind.”</p><p>Steph’s jaw dropped a little in the corner of Nate’s vision. “Are you kidding? People have literally always been obsessed with the strange and the scary.”</p><p>“Speaking of obsessed…” he muttered to his stale toast.</p><p>Matt rubbed at his temple as he tried not to lose his temper again, but he’d forgotten just how hard-headed his little brother could be when it came to Afton or Freddy's. “Look, we’re not jumping to any conclusions here, and saying that ‘this is Afton’s return’ or that ‘he’s not really dead’ or anything like that, but with everything else going on, I think it’s worth checking out at least.”</p><p>Nate got up, took a few steps away from the counter, and turned back to them, looking at them both long and hard. “Hey, you remember that ‘obsessed’ comment I just made? Yeah, that’s you, both of you. You see that, right? Because the first step for getting over an addiction…”</p><p>“Nate,” Matt interrupted, but Nate kept barreling on, his body shaking slightly.</p><p>“I just don’t get why you won’t let this stay dead, Matthew!” One hand gripped at his hair. “For the first time in - in as long as I can remember, I feel normal - or at least as close as I’ll ever get.” He gave a humorless laugh and smirked to the side, casting his gaze away from them, dropping his hand back to his side. “But ever since we killed Afton, you just keep insisting that it’s not over, that I’ll never…" He blinked up at the ceiling. "It’s almost like you hope-”</p><p>Matt got up, too, tried to come near to Nate, but his brother just took another step back. “We’re not hoping that it means anything, but Afton has been haunting our family since you were six, and killing children since long before that. We know from these symbols that he’s insanely powerful, and with the nightmares and your hallucinations-" Matt raised his hands slowly. "It just seems like something we should look into.”</p><p>“To make sure it’s nothing,” Steph added as she got up to stand by Matt.</p><p>Nate took one last step back, the backs of his legs hitting the futon, and he sat down. Skip plopped down beside him. Without looking, Nate reached out to pet the cat, mulling things over as he stared at the floor. He didn’t want to admit that they were probably smart to be paranoid, to chase down every possibility. But Nate didn’t want to be smart. He wanted to be free, free of Afton, free of hallucinations of dead children, free of the pressure to put this ghost story to rest. Free to have a life.</p><p>Steph stepped away, back to the bedroom, but she returned quickly with a paper that she put into Nate’s hand. “That’s the address for the Freddy’s location. Just let me know if you two find anything, okay?” She gave his shoulder a squeeze before going and kissing Matt good-bye. “Love you, boys. Keep an eye on each other, okay?”</p><p>Nate watched her leave, still lost in thought, and Matthew sipped his coffee while it was his turn to avoid eye-contact. Finally, Nate brushed a hand over his face and underneath his glasses, back behind the mask. “I think it’s a waste of time. I think you’re even more paranoid than I am - which is, you know, saying something - but I can swing by on my way out of town, I guess. If it’ll help put your mind at ease or whatever.”</p><p>Dismissive, cool, if a tiny bit reckless - that was Nate, after all.</p><p>Matt blinked. “Sorry, ‘I’? You think I’m letting you go by yourself? No, I’m coming with you.” He slipped past the futon to the bedroom, pulling his hoodie over his head.</p><p>“Oh, now it makes sense,” Nate muttered to himself as he stalked to the doorway of the bedroom. “Dude, I’ve had this conversation with your wife several times already. I can handle this on my own, no need to put yourself in danger.” It was what he'd been training his whole life for, after all. What he hadn't trained for was babysitting whichever of the Patricks decided to tag along.</p><p>Matt snorted as he changed his clothes. “Yeah, and did it ever work on her?”</p><p>Nate frowned.</p><p>“Besides,” Matt said as he bounced around, trying to maintain balance as he changed pants, “since when is ‘in danger’ a deciding factor?”</p><p>“It is for smart hunters.” Nate crossed his arms over his chest.</p><p>But Matthew only grinned at him, eyes still tired but with a little more humor at least. “Well, it’s a good thing I’m not a hunter, isn’t it?” Then he stumbled into the bathroom to brush his teeth.</p><p>“Dude, you are not helping your case,” Nate groaned as he shuffled into the bedroom after Matt. He could see then the bag Matthew probably hadn’t unpacked since they moved out of the Roadhouse, full of clothes and what few hunting supplies that had Matt kept on him even after he left for college. Matt might not have considered himself a hunter, but lessons taught by John Smith tended to stick around. The greatest of them being: always be prepared for the worst.</p><p>“You have no idea what’s actually out there!” Matt called around the toothpaste in his mouth. He poked his head out of the bathroom door, foam at the corners of his lips. “We have no idea what any of this actually means. I’m coming with you!”</p><p>A little bit of toothpaste hit Nate’s cheek, and he growled, “First of all, there’s nothing out there, and second of all, it doesn’t mean anything, and third, you were - like - just kidnapped and held hostage in a twenty-four hour Freddy Nightmare Fest. Take some time, get your head on straight first.”</p><p>Matt reappeared, his mouth wiped clean, his hair combed back, and he grabbed his bag from beside the bed. “Thanks, but I’m not about to let my punk little brother walk back into any Freddy’s alone, potential ghosts or witches or not. That just never goes well. Besides, I’m not doing much good around these parts.” He patted Nate on the cheek and headed past him, out the door. “Be good, Skeep!”</p><p>Nate spun on his heel. Now he was going to be the one to blow a fuse. “Hey, snotwad! When I told you to get a job, this is not what I meant!”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Prickly</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Y'all enjoying the longer chapters? Because starting with this fic they get LONG.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>April, 2011<br/>Later that Day</p><p>After a certain point, all little towns started to look the same to Nate. Whether they were smack dab in the middle of a corn field, a bean field, a cotton field or whether it was halfway to Nowhere, ten miles from Lost or anything else - they all boiled down to the same thing. All of them had a greasy restaurant. All of them had a kitschy motel. And all of them had a half-abandoned strip mall.</p><p>The overcast sky hanging above their heads felt claustrophobic, or maybe they’d just been in the car too long. Either way, when Matthew stretched his arms and his back in the parking lot of the strip mall, he felt like there was something pressing down on him, fencing him in, and the longer he stared at the old Freddy’s restaurant, the more potent that feeling became. The Freddy’s logo no longer hung above the door, but the shadow of it remained on the vinyl siding, etched by years of sun bleaching. Some things never quite went away like that.</p><p>Nate frowned around at the rest of the strip mall. Most of the stores were closed, empty, with big signs in the windows advertising that the space was for sale. A white van was parked in one corner of the parking lot - always one permanently fixed in any old lot. Weeds grew up between cracks in the pavement, and everything looked like it hadn’t seen its heyday in about thirty years. “Why are these places always so creepy?”</p><p>“What’s even creepier is how fast White Lawn emptied and stripped all these locations after buying out the franchise.” Matt rubbed at his chest, still feeling that pressure. “It’s like they wanted every last piece of ole Fredbear off the map.”</p><p>Nate sneered up at the building, one dark eyebrow raised and mouth crooked, as he approached with his bag of supplies. “Yeah well, good riddance.” He stalked to the front door where there were signs posted so that people wouldn’t trespass, but the chain and padlock that were apparently holding the front door closed lay on the ground in a pile, cut through. Nate scoffed as he knelt down to inspect it. “Kids these days, amiright?” Matt glared at him briefly as Nate stood, and he pushed open the door, gesturing inside. “Ladies first.”</p><p>The interior was just like any other Freddy’s, only completely stripped of its contents. Rather than posters of the animatronics, graffiti tags covered the walls. As Nate swept the beam of his maglight over the hallway, even with the sun from outside pouring into the empty room over their shoulders, he paused on a particular bit of graffiti art that said, “Some Nerds were here,” and he smirked, pointing. “Hey, Matt, you didn’t tell me you’d been here before!”</p><p>Matthew rolled his eyes. “Ha ha.” He pushed forward past Nate and kept looking, sweeping the EMF reader in front of him. Further down the hall, the graffiti became more and more sparse. Only the bravest miscreants seemed to make it this far, and suddenly, Matt gasped. “Nate!”</p><p>“What?” he asked, tripping to catch up as Matt shone his own flashlight on a piece of spray-paint art that Nate recognized with a wide grin. “Oh, it’s Nyan Cat! Ah, look at the little guy! Zoom, zoom kitty!”</p><p>Matt giggled. “It’s Skip!”</p><p>And the grin on Nate’s fell. “No, man. It’s clearly Nyan Cat. Get with it.” He walked away, shaking his head, much to Matt’s confusion as he laughed at his brother, mostly in shock.</p><p>By the time they made it to the bathrooms, Nate was humming to himself, content that they hadn’t found anything that looked important yet. Finally, he glanced back at Matt over his shoulder and asked, “So, this kind of thing is happening all around the country at different Freddy’s? This Freddy Bloody Mary thing?”</p><p>Matt pinched his nose shut as he entered the bathroom, looking around. He kept his eye on the EMF reader, which was oddly silent. The bathroom was filthy, as it had been when the restaurant was still open, and now having had time to bake in the summer heat… Matt blinked, feeling woozy. “Well, uh, there were Freddy’s all over, and they were…” He leaned against the wall to keep his head from spinning too much, “all shut down pretty suddenly among rather suspicious circumstances.”</p><p>Nate tried not to smirk too obviously at his older brother’s weak stomach. “What ‘suspicious circumstances’?”</p><p>“Oh, I don’t know, Nate. Do the child murders ring any bells?” Matt snapped. He wanted to get out of there already.</p><p>“Yeah, I suppose that makes sense.” Nate headed for the door, grabbing the front of Matt’s t-shirt to drag him out after him. Back in the hallway where the stench was a little less noticeable, Nate poked his way into one of the main party rooms. “Though, I always thought the murders were never publicized? Save for one or two locations…”</p><p>Matt shrugged as he kicked an empty beer can across the tile floor. “Besides the child murders, the franchise was doing super well. White Lawn buying it all, immediately shutting down every location, and liquidating the assets is a little... corporate.”</p><p>“Never trust the Man,” Nate muttered as the beam of his maglight swept over the stage. No animatronics. No screaming children. No ghosts, nothing. The place was silent as the grave, and Nate had never been more relieved. “So, any child murders at this location that we know of?”</p><p>“No, nothing.” Matt knelt down to check a weird stain on the floor only to find a small mountain of dried-up silly string. By the looks of it, someone had an all-out war in here, probably sometime after everything had been moved out. He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine someone actually enjoying themselves in this place. “This location was completely clean as far as Steph could find. No missing kids, nothing weird, not in the local papers or national.”</p><p>Nate stopped and turned. The light of his flashlight illuminating his brother’s face, making Matt squint. “So you’re telling me we just drove hours, after I already drove all night, to come debunk a bunch of meddling kids?”</p><p>Matt raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light. “Just because there’s no history at this particular location doesn’t mean there isn’t something here.” He stood up again as Nate dropped the beam from Matt’s face. “You saw the video, you think these kids could make something like that up?”</p><p>“Well-” Nate started to argue but then stopped. He’d had enough people growing up try to tell him what he did or didn’t see and hear, or accuse him of making stuff up for the attention. He sighed. “Well, maybe if they’re as nerdy as you.”</p><p>As Nate left the party room, Matt gawked after him, the corners of his lips turning up just a little. “Good to see your insults have only improved with time.”</p><p>The final stop on their grand tour of the restaurant was, as always, the security office and the hidden closet. If there was going to be a sign of something truly suspicious in the restaurant, it was going to be there, the center of Afton's usual work. Of course, after White Lawn cleaned everything out, it was unlikely much evidence remained. As they approached, however, Matt’s smile dropped suddenly, goosebumps rising on his arms. Nate ran his hand over the edge of the cracked drywall. “This can’t be good.”</p><p>Matt shone his light on the chunks of the wall left scattered around on the floor and stepped inside the closet through the giant hole that had been smashed in the wall. “This had to be intentional. It’s only within the old door frame, so someone must’ve bashed their way in knowing what was back there.” Still the EMF reader didn’t make a peep.</p><p>“Well, I would be a helluva a lot more concerned if it was someone <em>inside</em> bashing their way <em>out</em>,” Nate muttered as he crouched down to look at traces of footprints in the white dust of the broken drywall. “Tracks.”</p><p>Nate studied them for a moment as Matt watched him with piqued interest. “One adult, nice shoes, scuttled all over the place, and then something... bigger, a lot bigger, looks like it was walking around? There was also all kinds of other stuff in here recently, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.” He traced his flashlight along the path the footsteps took away from the closet. “Dust pretty much ends about two, three feet away, but it’s lost in all the other traffic anyway. Looks fresh though.”</p><p>Finally he turned his gaze back up to Matt who seemed stunned into silence, eyes beaming, and Nate stood up quickly. “What?”</p><p>“Nothing, nothing,” Matt stammered. He'd forgotten what it was like watching Nate at work, in his own element, but Matt knew he wouldn't react well to any kind of praise either. His kid brother certainly wasn't a genius at hunting, no way. So he changed the subject, “Do you think it was the technicians, maybe? When they were dragging away the suits?”</p><p>Nate shrugged as he scanned the floor and the interior of the closet again to look for any more clues. “Could be. I’m sure someone figured out these things exist by now, right? Everything else is pretty much cleared out.”</p><p>Matt nodded. Maybe it could all be easily explained away. Maybe the only thing that went bump was a squirrel in the vents. As much as he hated to admit it, he and Steph might've been wrong. He stepped back out of the closet, and a white, hot flash crossed his vision, blurring the world around him and making his head spin. His balance all but gone, he started to tumble forward into Nate who caught the front of his shirt and then his shoulders to hold Matthew up. “Hey, whoa, easy big guy. What, that bathroom give you cooties or something?”</p><p>“Sorry, I just-” Matt pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to regain his balance as he leaned heavily against Nate’s shoulder. “I just got dizzy all of a sudden. Must be the dust or the heat or something...”</p><p>Masking his concern with humor, Nate muttered, “Or that fact that this is the most physical exertion you’ve had in a month? What, getting old on me already, big brother?” Teasing was easier than admitting his worry, but Nate also checked his brother’s eyes to make sure he was absolutely okay. He couldn’t imagine that this - taking a little tour through a Freddy's - was easy for Matt after everything he’d been through. If it was causing some kind of panic response, Nate was ready to carry him out of there.</p><p>Finally, though, Matt seemed to get his legs back under him, a little color back to his cheeks, and he gave Nate’s shoulder a gentle pat. “You’re hilarious, Nate, but let’s get out of here already. This place is a bust.” He switched off the EMF reader and started for the door, though he kept one hand on the wall as he walked in order to maintain his tenuous balance.</p><p>Flipping his flashlight, catching it as it switched off, and sliding it into his pocket, Nate followed after him. “Yeah, if only I would’ve said that twelve hours ago.”</p><p>“Dude, stop whining about driving. I happen to know that you love it more than breathing - I’ve heard you say those exact words before.” Matt blinked in the sudden light breaking in through the front doors of the restaurant as they stepped outside.</p><p>Nate followed with his back turned to Matt, scanning as they left - just in case. “Yeah, you’re right. Especially since I got the shocks fixed. Well… half fixed.”</p><p>Matt snorted. “Yeah, <em>your half</em>!”</p><p>Reaching the door, Nate waved Matt through first and chuckled to himself while taking one last look around the interior of the Freddy’s, but his laughter died away as he noticed something moving among the shadows, the frame of a small girl hanging limp, blue tears streaming down her pale cheeks. But like light shifting through a moat of dust, she was gone again, and Nate noticed the familiar sensation of blood beneath his fingernails.</p><p>He didn’t want to think about what that meant.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Shouldering open the door to a tiny, cactus-themed motel room, Nate gawked in pure bliss at the decore. He launched himself onto one of the beds, scooping up a cactus-shaped throw pillow and pointing at the cactus night light on the stand between the beds. “Look at him! Dude - he’s wearing sunglasses! This cactus is a lamp, and he's wearing sunglasses! He is so much cooler than I am!”</p><p>“What, like it’s hard?” Matt asked with a grin as he dropped his bag onto the other bed.</p><p>Nate tucked the pillow beneath his chin and stared up at the cactus lamp like a little kid beaming up at a Christmas tree. “I want to be a cactus. I want to join the - cacti? Cactuses? Cacten?” He rolled onto his side as Matt booted up his old laptop and kicked his shoes off before leaning back against the headboard. Nate frowned in thought. “Cacti-people?”</p><p>Matt rolled his eyes and glared across at his brother. Some things never changed. “I thought you were going to get some sleep.”</p><p>Nate huffed and turned onto his back, staring up at the popcorn ceiling that was chipping away in some places, leaving behind patchy brown stains. He kicked off his boots with a yawn. “And I thought you were going to call the missus.”</p><p>“I will,” Matt said as he waited to connect to the egregiously slow internet. He could already feel his eye twitching. “Just wanted to get settled in first, check some of the forums where I’ve posted those sigils in case someone out there in Internet Land knows more than we do.” If his decent down the Freddy's rabbit hole had taught him anything, it's that there was an internet forum for everything, and that if there was something out there that you wanted to learn, some person on the internet knew it.</p><p>Rolling onto his side towards Matt, Nate rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. He hadn't slept in... well, he wasn't sure how long, and even the last time he'd actually slept, it had only been for a few hours, four tops. “How’re you two… doing, by the way? That ‘till death do you part’ thing still working out?”</p><p>Matt smiled fondly at his computer screen, and Nate didn’t think that it was the ancient runes that had him looking that dopey. “You mean being married to the love of my life? Great. I mean, as great as you can be for having lost everything you owned in a fire just a couple months ago and relying on one income to get you back on your feet… somewhat. I think the move helped, getting out of the Roadhouse, getting some level of independence back.”</p><p>Ro would’ve let them stay as long as they wanted, of course, but Matt and Steph both agreed that they’d rather have their own space, even if it was a dingy little apartment. Nate had cleared out not long after they did, certainly not wanting to overstay his own welcome. He figured Ro was still unsure about him in general, but she had pointed him in the direction of a job or two afterwards. That was the extent of their relationship - odd jobs and the occasional bad pun - but at least she didn’t want to lob off his head with a rusty machete anymore.</p><p>Nate glanced up at his brother again while pulling his glasses off and rubbing at his eyes again before setting the cheap plastic frames underneath the lamp on the beside table. “I get that - wanting your own space and stuff. But that place isn’t long-term, right?”</p><p>Matt wrinkled his nose. “Oh God no. Hopefully not, anyway. Straight out of college we didn’t have anything. There was a couple months we-” He laughed to himself, tilting his head back as he drifted off into his memories. “Once, we had to use all of our savings to get Steph a really nice suit to interview in. She had some nice clothes for past internships and stuff, but nothing this high calibre.”</p><p>Matt shook his head, chest swelling with pride. Steph was brilliant, and it always made Matt happy when other people realized it, too. And Nate was dead silent as he listened. It was like Matt was pulling back the curtains on a six-year old mystery Nate had been wondering about since Stephanie charged head-first into his life and decided that, whether he liked it or not, they were family, but his eyes were growing heavier and heavier as Matt went on, “And the suit wasn’t even that nice, but it was the nicest thing either of us owned by a long shot. That was how little we had, one change of professional attire and it was all gone. But then she got the job, and well, we were more than a little relieved.”</p><p>He sighed and rubbed his forehead. The old stress came back to him now that they seemed back to square one again. As much pride as he had in his wife for holding down a job after everything, he still couldn't help but feel guilty. “I was working a little too, here and there, but it’s hard to earn anything substantial with a degree in…”</p><p>Matt’s story was interrupted by a sudden snore, and he looked over to find that his brother had passed out, throw pillow still hugged to his chest, his eyelids purplish from lack of sleep, and his lips just slightly parted. He'd missed this, Matt realized, the little moments with his brother. Smirking fondly, Matt set his laptop aside. Gently as he could, he draped his jacket over Nate’s torso, set Nate’s shoes neatly at the foot of the bed, and switched off the cactus lamp. Then he grabbed his phone and headed outside in hopes Nate would get some much needed rest.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Hours later, Nate twitched lightly in his sleep. It was obvious by the grimacing lines in his face, the worried turn of his lips, that he was in the middle of a nightmare, and Matt squeezed his shoulder to wake him. The moment Nate’s eyes snapped open, he reached underneath his pillow for his hunting knife on instinct. Matt drew his hand back slowly and switched on the lamp so Nate could see his face.</p><p>“Hey easy, kid, it’s just me.”</p><p>Nate blinked a few times and glanced around in confusion, the sensation of falling asleep in the day and waking up at night making his head feel foggy. Then he fell back into the pillows, rubbing his eyes with a groan. “Why’d you let me sleep so long?”</p><p>Fluffing Nate's already messy hair, Matt grinned. “Hey, you were <em>out</em>, practically as soon as you hit the pillow. I’m guessing you didn’t sleep much on your last job?” Matt caught his jacket as Nate balled it up and threw it at his head. “I figured you could use the extra shut-eye.”</p><p>Pushing himself into a rather lopsided sitting position, Nate rubbed the last of the sleep from his face and hair, holding up one finger. “Coffee.”</p><p>Matt scoffed. “It’s dinnertime!”</p><p>Nate looked down as his stomach growled at the mere mention of food. “Then I’ll have coffee and a baked potato. What’s your point?”</p><p>Laughing, Matthew crossed the room to the coffee pot while Nate continued to look around. The laptop was opened and shining bright in his eyes, plugged into the wall and resting on a small table near the window where the cactus-print curtains were drawn closed. The evening news played softly over the box TV on the dresser across from the beds. A big brown bag of food sat beside the coffee pot where Matt was scooping grounds into the filter.</p><p>“You call Steph yet?” Nate asked as he yawned and stretched his arms over his head.</p><p>Matt replied over the sound of brewing coffee, “Yep, left her a message after you passed out, and she just got back to me while I was out getting dinner.”</p><p>“She find anything?” He dropped his arms, shoulders slumping as he yawned again.</p><p>“Nothing new, but she’s also been at work all day.” He poured them both a cup of coffee once it was done brewing. Tucking one into the crook of his arm, he grabbed the takeout bag and carried it all over to the table. He passed off one mug to Nate and settled down with his own, back at the laptop. Then he dug around in the bag and tossed something wrapped in foil to Nate who caught it with his free hand.</p><p>“She tends to think if the EMF didn’t pick up on anything, and we didn’t see anything weird, it’s probably nothing.”</p><p>Nate hummed as he unwrapped his dinner, a wrap or burrito or something. “I’ll try not to say ‘I told you so’ too many times, but… Is this chicken? What is this?” He frowned as he peeled back the tortilla.</p><p>Matt waved his hand vaguely as he pulled out his own dinner wrapped in foil. “It’s some kind of chicken ranch wrap or something. I figured it’s probably better than what you can find at a gas station.” He pulled a cooked onion from his wrap and flicked it back into the bag with a wrinkled up nose.</p><p>“Well, you’re not wrong.” Nate took a big bite of the wrap. “About this, the wrap. The rest of this trip?” Nate spun his finger in a circle through the air. “Totally wrong.”</p><p>Nate continued to dig into the wrap - a little cold and a little soggy but still better than any other meal he’d had in a week - as Matt propped his feet up on the bed across from his chair at the table and pulled his computer into his lap. “Yeah, apparently so.”</p><p>Sitting cross-legged, Nate wiggled his toes and his eyebrows in classic younger-sibling satisfaction. “Crazy how wrong you were. Gotta set a record or something.”</p><p>Matt glared at him across the top of the laptop screen. “Yeah, yeah, I guess we ought to start calling you the smart one now, huh?”</p><p>“Well, if you insist." Nate snickered to himself as he picked out a piece of chicken from the wrap and tossed it into the air to catch it in his mouth. Only it hit his nose instead and rolled onto the floor. Matt laughed at him and went back to work as Nate, grumbling, stooped to pick the piece of chicken up, and he quickly ate it when Matt wasn’t looking. Then, settling back again, Nate grabbed the remote from the bedside table and turned up the TV’s volume.</p><p>Matt was too focused on his research about the runes to pay attention to anything else, and he slumped deeper into the chair. “So, I was trying to look up more of these symbols, right, except I still couldn’t really remember them. But I found this interesting tidbit when it comes to using the circle in alchemy.” Matt drew a circle in the air with his finger without looking up. He always did talk with his hands a lot, but Nate’s eyes were drawn to the TV.</p><p>“Apparently, the circle represents the whole equation, start to finish, in its pure cycle. Every symbol in the entire... form has to do with the equation, but the symbols or elements inside the circle are the <em>ingredients</em> of the equation - what it takes to do whatever it’s designed to do.” Matt sighed and furrowed his brow at the screen, shifting his legs and crossing them the other way. “The symbols depicted outside the circle are the results. And here’s the kicker: every symbol I’ve found so far, guess where I remember seeing them?”</p><p>Nate, however, doesn’t answer him. Instead, he wordlessly turned up the volume of the TV again, this time gaining Matt’s attention as the feed switched to a breaking story, the somber face of a small-town reporter saying, “<em>... a new Amber Alert tonight, for sixteen year old Haylie Pena. Haylie is a student at Caliente West High. She is 5 foot 1, has brown hair, blue eyes, and weighs approximately 120 pounds. Haylie was last seen, reports say, by her friends, who had all snuck into the recently closed ‘Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza’ late last night. If you have any information about Haylie’s whereabouts, please call…</em>”</p><p>Muting the TV, Nate turned his head to look at Matt, but his brother didn’t exactly look satisfied with the information that he’d been right after all. Nate glanced over at the smiling, sunglasses-wearing cactus lamp and sighed, “Hear that, Mr. Spikes? Looks like you're stuck with us losers a little longer.”</p><p>Matt blinked slowly as Nate leaned closer to the bedside table, scooting the lamp closer to him as he winked and flashed his brother a smirk. “See? Practically twins.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Back to School</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>https://youtu.be/8wU0zI_hTJc?t=16<br/>I solemnly swear this is a joke and not a rick-roll.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>April, 2011</p><p>Parking the Firebird in the lot across from Caliente High, Nate and Matt climbed out and surveyed the masses of teenagers walking to and from their classes through the open courtyard at the center of the U-shaped building. Dressed in white button-downs and their best jeans, the boys walked inside to find even more students bustling about. The school smelled exactly like every school did, and Nate felt his stomach turn at the sudden rush of memories.</p><p>Matthew felt his own headache start again as he scanned the many faces and tried to think of what they would do next. They hadn’t really thought this through very well, but they knew that they needed to talk to the people who knew Haylie best. And that was most likely her fellow classmates.</p><p>Suddenly, someone called out to them, a middle-aged woman in a too-tight pantsuit with a chunky necklace and matching earrings, “Excuse me? Gentlemen? Can I help you?”</p><p>Both boys turned to her in unison, equally baffled looks on their faces. Matt cleared his throat. “Yes! We’re looking for someone - uh - who can direct us towards the…”</p><p>Another voice, sharp and harsh, echoed from the hall behind them as a short, stout woman click-clacked closer in her high heels. “Mr. Anderson? Mr. Cortez?”</p><p>Again, the two boys turned, but this time, Nate was the first to react. “Yes, I’m Mr. Anderson.” He gestured to Matt. “And he’s Cortez.”</p><p>Matt glared at him out of the corner of his eyes as Nate looked just a little too proud of himself, but it was best to go along with it. The second woman, the principal of the school - according to the nametag pinned to her blouse - drummed her fingernails on the clipboard in her hand. “Well, we’ve been expecting you for nearly an hour. Second period is about to begin and you haven’t even been to your classrooms yet, or met the teachers - or signed in!” This seemed a capital offense to this woman, truly the cardinal sin.</p><p>“Right, right,” Matt said quickly, spreading his hands out towards her with his best diplomatic smile, “we’re really sorry about the delay. We had some car trouble this morning, and it put us behind, unfortunately.”</p><p>One hand propped on her hip, the principal sighed in frustration. “You could’ve at least called the school to let us know you’d be running late.”</p><p>Matt floundered, his jaw opening and closing as he blinked once or twice, and Nate jumped in, “Phone trouble. We also - also had phone trouble.”</p><p>The principal raised her eyebrow at them. “Phone trouble?”</p><p>Sighing, Matt pursed his lips and nodded. “Phone trouble.”</p><p>“Apparently we found the Bermuda triangle of the west coast! Quite the adventure,” Nate added with an awkward chuckle. “You know… Mondays…”</p><p>“It’s Thursday,” the secretary added helpfully.</p><p>“Right,” Nate looked up at Matt, “‘Never could get the hang of Thursdays!’”</p><p>Matt smiles sympathetically, or as close to sympathetically as he can manage right about now. He clapped Nate on the back and turned back to the principal. “If you would just show us to our classroom, we’ll be happy to get started, ma’am!” Even though Matt had no idea what the heck she assumed they were there for.</p><p>The principal looked unsure of both of them, but the bell rang overhead, making her decision for her. Whether they were who they said they were or not, she had a schedule to keep, so she started down the hall, waving for the two of them to follow. “Fine, fine! Right this way.” Then, glancing over her shoulder at them, she asked, “Did you not bring any supplies?”</p><p>Nate smiled at her and adjusted his glasses. “No, ma’am, we travel light!”</p><p>Unconvinced, the principal turned back the way that they were going. “Very well.” Once her back was to them, the boys both had a stern but silent conversation through their glares and hand gestures, and quickly followed after the principal as she greeted students along the way.</p><p>Stopping in front of one of the classroom doors, the principal gestured towards it. “This is your first classroom, Mr. Cortez. They’re expecting you, so no need to waste anymore time.” She checked her clipboard and her watch. “Mr. Hawkins is your teacher for the day. He’ll be happy to meet you and help you in any way he can.”</p><p>The boys glanced in the small window to see a room with built in risers and instruments lined along the back wall in large wooden shelves. Nate’s eyes widened. “Actually, I think this was my assignment!”</p><p>Both the principal and Matt stared at him, Matt blinking like he couldn’t believe that Nate would give this woman one more reason why they were obviously not who they said they were, but Nate just grinned, dimples and all. “My partner and I made a few last-minute changes to our… program, but it shouldn’t affect anything.”</p><p>Either the principal was dense or too tired to care. Matthew guessed the latter, but either way, she nodded along. “As you’d like. Have fun.” And Nate, beaming and smug as ever, walked into the classroom as all eyes turned towards him. Then he spun on his heel, gave Matt a double thumbs-up, and turned back to the teacher who stood from his desk.</p><p>The principal looked up at Matt, and he tried to appear calm, glancing nervously after his younger brother. “He’s… excited.”</p><p>“Well,” she said, crossing the hallway to another door with cartoonish art of science equipment taped beneath the small window. Matt felt his heart skip a beat as the principal nodded towards the door. “You’ll be here with Miss Watson this morning.” The principal knocked softly on the door and pushed inside. “Good morning, Miss Watson, good morning class. This is Mr. Cortez, the guest instructor you’ve been expecting.”</p><p>An older woman with white hair and wearing a bright, floral print dress adjusted her glasses on her face and peered up at Matthew with a gentle smile. “Good morning, Mr. Cortez! Pleasure to have you with us today!”</p><p>Matt shook her hand, ducking his head a bit as she studied him. “The pleasure is mine, I assure you.”</p><p>Already half-way out the door, the principal turned back to Matt as she left, “Well, you two have fun. Drop by my office on your way out for your assessments, alright?”</p><p>“Wait - assessments?” Matt asked as Miss Watson squinted at him a little longer.</p><p>“You don’t look like a Mr. Cortez…” she commented softly.</p><p>The principal, on the other hand, seemed at the end of her whits, checking her watch yet again. “Yes, the assessments. Aren’t you here to audit the class’s curriculum and test levels so far this semester?”</p><p>Matt stared at her a moment before turning back to Miss Watson who was still beaming. “We just finished our chapter on reproduction, and I think the state will be quite pleased with our average grades!”</p><p><em>Reproduction, of course.</em> Matt wanted to crawl under a rock, but he managed a smile and said through his teeth, “Sure… pleased. Can’t wait to get started!”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Nate crossed the room to the middle-aged teacher with thick black-framed glasses and his hair swept back from his face in a singular, slick wave. “Hawkins,” the man introduced himself, and Nate shook his hand. “Glad to have you!”</p><p>“I’m Anderson, Mr. Anderson. Glad to be here!” He looked around at the students who were studying him with dead expressions. Welcome to high school.</p><p>Mr. Hawkins nodded, sweeping a hand through his hair and chuckling to himself. “Wow, that’s great! I have to say, it isn’t often you find someone so excited about religion at nine o’clock in the morning!”</p><p>Something short-circuited in Nate’s brain, but he managed not to let his smile waver. “About what?”</p><p>“Religion!” Mr. Hawkins strode to his desk and returned with a copy of his syllabus which looked like a bunch of nonsense to Nate. “Per the state’s request we just finished the unit on Catholic Saints and their canonization.”</p><p>One of the students in the second row piped up, his voice deadpan, “Did you know that in 363 in the Roman Empire, Cassian was sentenced to death for not worshiping pagan gods and his students were charged with hacking him to death?”</p><p>Nate cleared his throat, his smile no less wide but now a little less bright. “Huh! No, no I didn’t know that.”</p><p>Hawkins removed his glasses and started cleaning the lenses on his shirt. “Odd, I thought you were here from the state to evaluate the progression of the class so far?” He put his glasses back on and took another look at Nate who inched away conspicuously. “You look rather young to be working for the Department of Education…”</p><p>“I get that a lot,” Nate answered quickly and turned back to the student who’d first spoken up. “But, uh, yeah… Castiel!”</p><p>“Cassian,” another student corrected him.</p><p>“Cassian. Good guy.” Nate rubbed his hands together, feeling them start to sweat. “He’s a - a saint.”</p><p>One student in the back actually rolled their eyes while Hawkins hid a humored smile behind his hand, and Nate continued to flounder. If he was going to leave this room without getting hacked to pieces - figuratively or maybe even literally - by a bunch of punks wearing too much AXE body spray, he was going to have to think of something and fast.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>By the time Matthew slipped into the room across the hall, finally escaping Miss Watson and her many, many interesting tidbits about the birthing process with an excuse about needing to use the restroom, he found Nate sitting cross-legged on a desk in the middle of the classroom, the rest of the desks turned towards him as the students talked.</p><p>“Listen, listen! Famous theologians from all throughout history have talked about the soul, that it exists, and what it means. Confucius - he had his five merits, right?” One girl glanced over her shoulder at Hawkins who was watching in obvious amusement. “What were they - his five foundations or something?”</p><p>But Hawkins motioned to another student who’d already looked it up on their phone. “It says, ‘To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.’”</p><p>“There you go,” the first girl said again, turning back to Nate. “Generosity of soul.”</p><p>Another student, a guy who had a giant, green turtle shell backpack resting against his desk, piped up, “You can’t call Confucius a theologian! He was a - a wise dude! A - what is the word…”</p><p>“Philosopher,” Hawkins offered, though it seemed he preferred his student’s term.</p><p>“Exactly,” Turtle Shell Backpack said, “They study the way you think and act, and stuff. A theologian studies religion and all that.”</p><p>Nate narrowed his eyes a little in thought. “Yeah but if the human soul, which we’ve pretty much established exists - according to all of these dudes and like, thousands of others, is something of spiritual nature since it’s not - you know - <em>physical</em>, it would fall under the category of religion, right? Spirituality?”</p><p>The student who mentioned Cassian earlier finally raised his head again. “But theology is the study of certain religions texts, like the Bible, not just the soul.”</p><p>“So would you consider Muslims theologians?” Hawkins asked as if to prompt the conversation on, and one of the students answered quickly.</p><p>“They are, they just study, like, holy books, doesn’t matter what religion.”</p><p>“You’re right,” Matt called from his position by the door, leaning back against the wall as he drew everyone’s attention. “Nearly every culture across the globe has some belief regarding the human soul. ‘Religious books,’ therefore, can involve secular books and teachings too, like wicca, witch doctors, anything that governs people or beliefs based on a spiritual nature, instead of a - an intellectual one, like philosophy or politics.”</p><p>Hawkins nodded to Matt and then back to the class. “It’s also entirely possible to discuss the soul outside of this discipline, as hundreds of artists have done. The soul to them is a place of deep understanding of the world and others, deep expression of beauty or emotion, a satisfaction felt beyond just our emotional or physical understanding. <span>Therefore, the ‘soul,’ it’s very nature, existence, and the study of it is a subject of vast universal interest, ranging from artists to pragmatic doctors, to theologians. It can furthermore be found in every last corner of the world, throughout time, and generally is something that is understood, or felt, throughout the vast majority of humanity.” Pausing momentarily, Hawkins looked around the class, his eyes shining. “The conclusion we can make here today is that the soul exists. Unless, of course, you’re part of the fraction of humanity that believes it doesn't.”</span></p><p><span>“Vibe check failed,”</span> Nate added, and the students cracked up just before the bell rang. Even as they got up to gather their things and leave, the students kept chatting with Nate, swapping memes and asking a few more questions that Nate did his best to answer until Matt made his way over.</p><p>“Dude, why didn’t we go to this high school?” Nate asked him. “This school rocks.”</p><p>“Says you.” Matt rubbed his forehead and shivered slightly. “You want to know what class I got stuck in thanks to your little stunt? Actually, never mind, it was probably for the best.” Matt didn’t think that Nate’s middle-schooler maturity and sense of humor would last five minutes in a room with Miss Watson going over the virtues of safe sex and the reproductive organs.</p><p>Nate waved as the last of the students filed out, and Matt and Nate eventually slipped into the hallway once it was mostly empty. “Mr. Hawkins is pretty awesome, too, and I totally turned the whole thing into an open mic debate night. The kids seemed to really like it, don’t you think?”</p><p>“More than the ones I was with.” Matt shook his head, pressing his hands over his eyes. “I drilled kids on safe sex and STDs for an hour and half before I finally escaped.”</p><p>Nate winced and hissed through his teeth. “That’s rough buddy.”</p><p>“Mr. Anderson!” The boys both looked back to see Hawkins jogging to catch up with them. “I have to say, when we were told about these audits, I was more than a little apprehensive. But, I think it went very well.”</p><p>Sheepishly, Nate rubbed at the back of his neck with a nervous smile. “Well, in my experience, kids know what they know, and they want to know just about everything else. I was always an ‘argue it out first’ kind of kid myself.”</p><p>Matt smirked to himself. Boy was that the truth.</p><p>“Whatever training the state put you through, I can recommend it.” Checking his watch, Hawkins pointed down the hallway with his thumb. “I am actually heading to the lounge for lunch, if you and your partner would like to join.” He looked up at them both expectantly, and Nate glanced up at Matt who shrugged.</p><p>“Yeah, that sounds great,” Nate finally answered, his stomach just starting to growl at even the thought of food. “Mr. Hawkins, this is Mr. Cortez.”</p><p>“Nice to meet you,” Hawkins shook Matt’s hand, studying him as he had Nate. “Both of you are quite young for this job. I have to say that I’m impressed with both of your additions to the discussion in there.”</p><p>Matt’s eyes went a little wide, and Nate could tell that he was starting to reach his limit. His nerdy brother was great with people, but after being cooped up in his tiny apartment for so long, his social limit seemed lower than usual. “Well, you know what they say,” Nate said with absolutely no explanation and then nudged Matt with his arm. “Why don’t we swing by the cafeteria and grab lunch before we meet Hawkins in the lounge, hm?”</p><p>And Matt nodded quickly. “Yeah, we should probably do that.”</p><p>“Hope you two can find something edible,” Hawkins said and headed for the teachers lounge as Matt and Nate followed some students to the cafeteria, waving over their shoulders.</p><p>“Man, this has got to be the stupidest thing that we’ve done in a long time,” Matt muttered under his breath. “And for what? We haven’t gotten anywhere.”</p><p>Nate slapped Matt on the back and pushed him into the cafeteria first as they came to the double doors. “That’s what you think, brother, but I happen to have an in with the kids now. Watch and learn!” They swung through the food line quickly. Nate snatched up an apple and tossed a somewhat-green banana to Matt before winking to one of the lunch ladies.</p><p>He scanned the room casually as Matt paid for their fruit and two cartons of milk, and easily enough, he spotted some of the students that had been in Hawkins’ class. And they spotted him, too. “Mr. Anderson!” one of the girls called and waved him over.</p><p>“Call me Nate,” he said as he approached. “And this is my partner, Matt.”</p><p>The boys took a seat at the table as the students crowded together to make room for them. The guy with the turtle backpack was with them, grinning ear to ear, “Dude, that class was killer! Hawkins said we’d have to take a super big test or something, and we’ve been studying all week.”</p><p>Nate made a face and peeled the sticker off of his apple. “Are you kidding me? Tests are lame.” Matt cleared his throat, but Nate just gave him a sideways smirk.</p><p>One of the other students leaned closer, almost conspiratorially, “Shouldn’t you two be in the teacher’s lounge?”</p><p>“Nah, you kids are much more entertaining than those old farts.” Nate took a bite of his apple, leaning one elbow onto the table, relishing the way that Matthew squirmed like Nate might somehow blow their covers.</p><p>Matt glared at his little brother. “Stay in school, though, kids.” And Nate, for his part, nodded along, trying to look very serious as he did.</p><p>The sour-faced kid who’d made the Cassian comment in class began to ask,“Mr. Anderson, about what we talked about in class, what do you think about…”</p><p>But the others jumped on him quickly with a chorus of, “Dude, shut up!” and “Yeah, don’t bother him with that!”</p><p>Nate looked around at all of them, an eyebrow raised. “Bother me with what?”</p><p>The first kid, his dark blond bangs falling in his eyes and the hood of his jacket drawn over his head, lowered his voice as he asked, “What do you think about… ghosts?”</p><p>Nate and Matt tried not to look at one another. Of course, they both had quite a few thoughts on ghosts, had encountered them up close and very personal in the past, but that didn’t mean they could just go blabbing about it to a bunch of tenth graders. Nate rested the apple against his chin. “Ghosts… you mean like Gastly?”</p><p>“Told you he wouldn’t believe us,” one of the girls muttered as she opened the book she’d brought with her. She was the smart one from class, Nate remembered, probably read all the time. Probably also had a healthy disrespect for authority.</p><p>“No, like human ghosts,” the emo boy insisted, and Matt had to admit he reminded him of a certain someone when he was in high school. “Spirits, angry ones, ones that still haunt places,” the kid went on. “Ones that might want to hurt people.”</p><p>Matthew started peeling his banana to keep his hands from visibly shaking. He knew he needed to remain calm if they didn’t want to spook these kids, even more than they already were, anyway. “You guys sound like you’ve seen one or something.”</p><p>“Or something,” the girl muttered as she flipped the page in her book. The other kids shared warning glances over her head, and Nate nodded slowly as he began to read the fear in their eyes.</p><p>“Ooh, so you have.”</p><p>“No we haven’t!” the turtle backpack boy insisted, biting his lip. “We just... <em>everyone</em> is talking about them lately, at that old pizza place that closed down? They say if you go in there, you can summon one.”</p><p>“A vengeful spirit?” Matt asked, sounding a little too eager, and Nate kicked him under the table. Matt shot him a glare. “You know, like in the TV shows? My wife loves those.”</p><p>Taking another bite of his apple, Nate smirked, “You ever tried it, summoning something?” More silence as the kids stared at one another. Nate swallowed. “Look guys, if you can commune with the dead here, I want in on the action. We can be the next ‘Scooby-Gang’! We can make movies!”</p><p>“Not a chance!” the girl shouted and slammed her book closed. “I am never doing that again!”</p><p>“Oh come on,” the other girl muttered, this one with a pretty killer nose-piercing in Nate’s opinion. “Nothing actually happened.”</p><p>Book girl glared at her friend. “Oh, yeah? Then where’s Haylie, huh?”</p><p>Everyone went silent then, their heads bowed. Nate took another bite of his apple and rolled his eyes towards Matthew. Neither of them wanted to admit that these kids might be onto something, but it was getting harder and harder to deny the facts. Even hormonal teenagers knew what they were talking about some of the time. After a full minute of awkward silence, Matt cleared his throat. “Um, who’s Haylie?”</p><p>Backpack Dude leaned in and gestured for the others to do the same, like they might get into trouble if they were overheard. “So, there’s this trend, right? To go into that pizza place and summon a ghost? Well, we did it. A couple nights ago.”</p><p>“And what happened?” Nate wasn’t surprised. He was pretty sure back in the classroom that he had recognized these kids from the video Stephanie had shown him, but he listened like he couldn’t believe a word they were saying.</p><p>“The hell should we know?” nose-piercing girl cried as she threw her hands over her head. “Everything went crazy! Things were shaking, the floor was rattling, and I swear, something was in that place with us!”</p><p>“Like a ghost?” Matt asked softly.</p><p>The emo boy raised his head a little again. “Whatever it was, it was huge… bigger than any of us, bigger than a human. And it was loud! Like it was trying to talk to us or something.” When he said that, Nate frowned, but the kid just shivered a little at the memory. “One look at it and we all ran.”</p><p>Book girl poked at the mac and cheese on her tray with her plastic fork like she couldn’t be bothered to even try to eat. “Haylie was with us, ran right out the front doors beside me. Then we all scattered, and… we were texting about it later. But she was quiet. We just thought she was spooked or something, but…”</p><p>“She never came to school yesterday,” the backpack kid said, his dark brown eyes wide as he looked from Nate to Matt and back again. “We didn’t think anything of it. Haylie was constantly skipping class and hanging out with her boyfriend instead. She had already had to repeat her sophomore year because of it, but then last night on the news, they said she was missing.” His voice fell at the end, and Nate could see the guilt that was tugging at him inside.</p><p>Matt’s voice was sympathetic as he asked, “And none of you saw what the thing was?” They all swapped another fearful, solemn look. Even the girl with the nose-piercing dropped her gaze away from the others. “Guys, if you saw something, you should tell someone. It could help Haylie.”</p><p>“How?” book girl snapped at him.</p><p>Nate set the apple aside and leaned in further as he adjusted his glasses on his nose. “Maybe something happened to her, maybe it wasn’t a ghost. A hundred things could have gone down, and if you saw something, that might help narrow it down.”</p><p>Keeping his eyes averted, the emo boy handed Nate his phone, and on it, another video played from that night in the restaurant, this one from a different angle than the one that Stephanie had shown them. As the group of kids, including Haylie, ran through the front doors, a horrible metallic clanging resounded in the background, so loud that it drowned out the kid’s shouts and cries for help. Then, at the end of the hallway just as the doors started to close behind the person holding the phone, Nate saw a flash of something menacingly big and putrid yellow in color.</p><p>Nate and Matt didn’t have to wonder what it was, that much they knew for sure.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The teacher’s lounge smelled of stale coffee. Most everyone was sitting over lunches of limp salad or the occasional homemade meal. They chatted to one another, mostly about students, and as the boys entered, they were largely ignored aside from Hawkins who seemed a bit overly thrilled to see them. He abandoned his lunch of an egg salad sandwich and met them by the door. “Did you two get lost?”</p><p>Matt waved what was left of his banana and sighed. “Got held up in the lunch line.”</p><p>“It was chicken nugget day,” Nate said, and every teacher in the room grumbed in unison.</p><p>Hawkins laughed and gestured around to the room as if to gain their attention. “Everyone this Mr. Anderson and Mr. Cortez, the auditors from the state.” Everyone but Miss Watson seemed more annoyed by this fact than anything else, but Matt and Nate both tried to appear friendly, awkward waves and slight shuffling as they clutched their cartons of milk. “Anderson was with me this morning, and Cortez, you were…”</p><p>“I was with the lovely Miss Watson,” Matt said, and Miss Watson actually giggled from behind the paperback romance novel she was reading. Matt blanched a little, and Nate wiggled his eyebrows up at his brother.</p><p>He couldn’t wait to tell Steph about Matt’s seventy-five year-old girlfriend.</p><p>“My kids tried to eat him alive this morning,” she admitted with a wave of her wrinkled hand. “But he handled it like a pro!”</p><p>Matt nodded his head a bit, and - glancing pleadingly at Nate from the corner of his eye - added, “Well, you can thank my wife for that.” That got a laugh from the rest of the room, and Nate gave Matt the “You’re off the hook for now” look.</p><p>“So, you never really answered my question earlier,” Hawkins said as he led the boys to one of the small, round tables in the room where his lunch was laid out like he was due for a military inspection. Napkin spread out flat, plastic silverware in position, his sandwich cut into perfect triangles - it made Matt smirk. “How did the two of you end up working for the state?”</p><p>Nate opened his mouth, but Matt answered before he could make another joke. “Just trying to look out for kids and their education, I guess. Make sure they are learning what they need to.”</p><p>Hawkins’ eyes lit suddenly as they all took a seat around the table. “Well! If you ask me…” Everyone in the room groaned, the same way they had when Nate had mentioned the chicken nuggets. They were like a hive mind.</p><p>“Here we go again,” said one.</p><p>And a woman refilling the coffee machine laughed, “The ‘they’re learning more on the streets than in my classroom’ speech. Honestly.”</p><p>Hawkins raised an eyebrow at both of the boys, a sort of a “See what I have to deal with?” kind of look, and Nate held up a hand - <em>Say no more.</em></p><p>Hawkins went on, “Hey, hey, it’s a real concern of mine! You know, I was almost an engineer back in my day, but I decided I was done learning in a classroom, when the only place I’d ever use those skills was in a <em>classroom</em>,” Hawkins started, in abject horror at his own naivety. “So I dropped out, did some minimum wage jobs for awhile, and then wised up and faced the inevitable. I became a teacher.”</p><p>As Nate polished off the last of his apple between chugs of milk, Matt asked, “Did you ever finish your degree?”</p><p>Hawkins scoffed, brushing his hand through the air. “In computer engineering? You know how quickly that field moves on?” He snapped his fingers to make his point. Matt and Nate both nodded. “At least the kids these days seem able to keep up. I swear, they only engage with you if you’re on a screen.” When Hawkins turned to throw his napkin in the trash, Matt caught Nate rolling his eyes out of the corner of his gaze and kicked his brother under the table. Payback.</p><p>Hawkins just kept talking. “They don’t listen to me, or anybody, and it’s all for the same reasons. Why learn religion and language and history when you’ve got friends - what is it now - ghost hunting? At Freddy’s no less, a good, family-friendly place like Freddy’s.”</p><p>Nate choked on a bite of his apple, and Matt reached over to pat him on the back as he kept the conversation going, following a gut feeling, “Oh yeah, I heard about that. Some girl just went missing, didn’t she?”</p><p>“Haylie Pena,” Hawkins confirmed as his gaze shifted to Nate who was still hacking up bits of apple. “One of my students. Poor girl. Never a model student, but brilliant in her own ways.” Hawkins tutted his tongue. “I guess one of them finally got what was coming to them.”</p><p>As Nate caught his breath, he and Matt swapped a look as Hawkins glowered down at the remainder of his lunch, “Maybe now the rest of them will learn.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. The Unusual Suspects</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>First rule of D&amp;D is that you never split the party, even when it's just you and your idjit brother. It never ends well!</p><p> </p><p>Speaking of the dungeons and the dragons, though, if you guys haven't checked out Nate's stream Plaguewinds over on his YouTube channel, the party just wrapped up the final episode of their short homebrew campaign Monday night, and boy was it a doozy. You should definitely give it a listen if you haven't already!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>April, 2011</p><p>“So it’s not a ghost,” Nate said, still wheezing a little as they burst out of the back doors of the school.</p><p>“Definitely not.” Matt pulled them up short as he saw the principal walking by. They hid behind a concrete pillar and waited for her to pass, Matt hissing, “The only yellow animatronic I know of is Chica, but I swear I saw ears on that thing.”</p><p>“Yeah, it’s not one I recognize.” When they reached the car, Nate unlocked his side and then paused. “It was like a yellow… greenish Bonnie, but hey, speaking of Chica.” Nate ducked inside the car, reaching across to unlock Matt’s side. “What do you think about Haylie having a boyfriend? One she was known to skip classes with? Seems kinda shady to me.”</p><p>Matt climbed in and unbuttoned the top of his shirt. It was stifling inside the Firebird, which had been baking in the sun all morning, and the AC was not the best either as Nate started her up and got them back onto the main road running through town. “Well, Hawkins did say Haylie was ‘brilliant in her own, special ways.’ I’m guessing a good judge of character isn’t one of them.” He blinked.</p><p>Something about Hawkins bothered him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “Lord, that guy has a lot of opinions, and most of them are kind of mean.”</p><p>Nate nodded and turned the AC up a little more even though it was only blasting warm air. “So, what now?”</p><p>“I want to go back to Freddy’s again, but it’s probably crawling with cops by now, or at least being watched.” Matt swept a hand through his slightly damp hair. If only they’d known what they know now when they were there yesterday. They could’ve done a closer sweep of the place. “You think this boyfriend is worth checking out?”</p><p>“Well, I personally can appreciate a fine looking gentleman just as much as any other proud, masculine dude, but I’ve never seen him, so I can’t tell yah.” Nate gave his brother a smarmy smile and donned his sunglasses like the true douche that he was.</p><p>Matt wanted to reach over and flick his nose but decided against it, only because Nate was currently driving. “Yeah, yeah, we all know about your man-crush on Chris Evans.”</p><p>Nate made a clicking noise with his mouth and sighed. “He’s so hot. I mean, his biceps are the size of my head! How - how is that even possible?”</p><p>Rolling his eyes, Matt glanced out the window at the passing buildings. The town was crawling with people today, passing out fliers and hanging up more on every telephone pole and street light. Having the entire town on high alert probably wasn’t going to help their case any. “Well, here and now in reality, why don’t you go look into the boyfriend, and I’ll head back to Freddy’s. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”</p><p>Mostly to himself, Nate whispered, “I’d like to get lucky with Chris Evans, that’s for sure.”</p><p>“Nathan!” Matt laughed as his brother smirked.</p><p>“Man - that's America's Ass! And I salute it!” Nate turned down the road towards the motel as his older brother was reduced to high-pitched giggles and the occasional snort. Dang if he didn’t live for it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>An hour later, Matt walked down the sidewalk that ran past the old strip mall, a leather messenger bag on one shoulder. He paused at the edge of the parking lot, and sure enough, the place was crawling with police. Yellow tape now covered the entrance, and blue and red lights flashed like the Fourth of July. Turning in place, Matt surveyed the rest of his surroundings.</p><p>Most everything in the strip mall was closed, and what shops were still open were already full of police officers asking questions. Across the street, however, a burger shop snuggled up next to a tiny bank with a security camera pointed right at the parking lot of the Freddy’s. Matt peered around once more just to make sure he wasn’t being watched and then sprinted across the street to the front door of the bank.</p><p>Inside, Matt whipped off his sunglasses and smiled sweetly at the receptionist. He produced a fake badge from his leather bag, flashing it at her quickly. “Ma’am, I’m Detective Steele. My boys and I were over at the old restaurant just now looking into the missing girl’s case, and I noticed you have quite a few cameras around the perimeter. Any chance one of them might have been pointed across the way the night Haylie disappeared?”</p><p>The woman stood, wringing her hands together and flashing a nervous smile. Matt could only imagine what it was like - a young girl going missing in a town as small as this. “I’m not sure, but I can show you to the back to look for yourself?”</p><p>“Thank you very much,” Matt said with a nod, waited for her to buzz him through, and followed her around the desk to the security office. Of course, since this was such a small town, little more than a closet with a few monitors glowing in the low light and a rubber plant in the corner awaited him. Matt took a seat at the desk and gave the computers a once-over.</p><p>“Let me know if you need anything,” the receptionist offered while twisting at her wedding ring.</p><p>Matt smiled at her again. “Thank you, but I think I can manage.” Once she was gone, he went to work combing through the feeds. He didn’t know how much time he would have before someone else showed up, so he didn’t have a lot of time to mess around.</p><p>He pulled a large leather notebook from his bag and flipped it open, a pen poised in his hand as his eyes scanned the files saved to the computer. Twenty minutes of speeding through hours of footage and taking notes on any movement he noticed, he finally found the right timestamp. When the kids arrived on the scene, Matt slowed down the video and leaned in to see them better.</p><p>Sure enough, it was the bunch from the lunch table along with another girl, Haylie. Noting the time they arrived, the time they left, and what Haylie was wearing, Matt then focused on something else that caught his eye. He rewound the feed a few times just to make sure that it wasn’t a trick of the light. After the fourth time, he was positive.</p><p>Once the kids had fled, someone else stood in the doorway, someone he hadn’t seen enter.</p><p>Matt flexed his jaw. “Huh.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Back at the front desk, the receptionist looked up again as two officers walked in. “Can I help you?” she asked, a hint of confusion in her voice.</p><p>The officer, the real one, showed her his badge and nodded towards the back. “Yeah, we were hoping to look at your security cameras.”</p><p>She smiled, only her eyes betraying her uncertainty. “Oh, Detective Steele is back there now.”</p><p>The second officer narrowed his eyes. “Detective who?”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Matt furiously scribbled in his notes as he rewound the feed one last time and videoed it on his phone before dashing the notebook into his bag and tucking his pen behind his ear. In the lobby, the officers were buzzed through the front gate at the receptionist’s desk, and when they reached the door to the security office, they flung it open only to find the room empty.</p><p>Outside in the sun, Matt flicked his sunglasses open with one hand, slid them onto his face as he passed the bank, and dialed up his little brother. He smirked as one glance in the front windows revealed the bank was in upheaval as they searched for “Detective Steele,” and dripping with smug satisfaction, he headed back in the direction of the motel, his phone pressed to his ear.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>An hour earlier…</p><p>The Firebird pulled up to a cramped duplex on the rougher side of town, though the town was barely big enough to have “sides.” More cars lined up and down the street, among them a white van that caught Nate’s eye. He felt like he’d seen it before but wasn’t quite sure where. He checked for the hunting knife that he kept strapped to the back of his belt and then stuck his pistol into his waistband where his flannel would hide it before getting out and further surveying the street.</p><p>There were fliers everywhere, all with Haylie’s name and face plastered on them. People stood on both street corners handing out more of them to anyone who happened to walk by. It seemed like the whole town was out looking for this girl, but Nate just wondered if Chad Phillip - the shady boyfriend in question - was quite as concerned. Readying himself, Nate made his way up the front steps and knocked on the door.</p><p>When it opened, a middle-aged woman in an oversized t-shirt and shorts blinked up at him. Nate flashed her a smile. “Hi, is Chad around?”</p><p>“Yes, he’s inside,” the woman said, tossing her head toward the interior of the house where Nate could see a group of people gathered in the den. “Come on inside.” She led Nate in, and he scanned the entryway behind her back.</p><p>A few family photos covered the walls, one in particular catching Nate’s attention. Haylie stood in a bright turquoise gown glittering with sequins, and a young man, though obviously older than Haylie, was at her arm - a prom picture, if he had to guess. They looked happy.</p><p>The den, on the other hand, was overflowing with people, all roughly the same age, young and with their hands full of the fliers Nate had seen everywhere. One of them, the young man from the prom picture, rushed at Nate. “Have you heard anything?”</p><p>“No, I’m - Chad, right?” Nate pointed to him, and the guy backed up a step.</p><p>“Yeah, yeah sorry.” Chad brushed a hand through his long brown hair, his eyes red and rimmed with tears. “We’ve just had all kinds of people in and out of here, canvassing the neighborhood, and I’ve been out all day…”</p><p>“Looking for Haylie,” Nate finished for him as Chad glanced away.</p><p>Chad’s shirt was stained with sweat. The bottle of water in his hand shook from nervous energy, and he twisted his fingers through his hair and squinted up at Nate like he was just starting to put two and two together. “You are here to help, right?”</p><p>“Oh, of course! Um,” Nate glanced around at the other people in the room with them. No one in particular stood out to him. They all just looked like people who wanted to do their part to find the missing girl. “So no one’s heard anything yet, I’m guessing?” A few people shook their heads, and Chad’s shoulders slumped even farther.</p><p>The woman who had let Nate in interjected herself at that point, tilting her head towards Chad. “Lou just called. The first canvas team is headed back now.”</p><p>“They get anything?” Chad asked eagerly, and Nate took a step back, edging towards one of the room’s exits.</p><p>“Think Lou would’ve said something if they did,” he heard the woman say as he turned his back and slipped down one of the quieter hallways. He needed to think, maybe see if there was anything of Haylie’s around the house that might point them in the right direction. But the worry in Chad’s eyes looked real, and Nate liked to think he was a pretty decent judge of character. He doubted the poor guy had anything to do with the disappearance.</p><p>He stuck his head inside the kitchen, which had been turned into a makeshift command center of sorts. The printer on the breakfast nook table was constantly spitting out more fliers. Some people were sitting around in the corner making posters, pasting pictures of Haylie to them. Snacks had been set out next to more stacks of the same fliers, and Nate helped himself to some little sausages and Triscuits as he studied the photo of Haylie closer. Nate hadn’t noticed before, but Haylie had a tattoo on her neck, some kind of flower, almost tropical looking.</p><p>Movement in the hallway caught Nate’s attention then as two figures snuck past the doorway to the kitchen and away from everyone else, and whether it was the way that they moved or just his natural paranoia, Nate decided to follow after them. Folding the flier, he tucked it into his back pocket and turned the corner to a small laundry room. The smell of detergent was strong like someone had just washed a load of clothes, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary until someone from behind shoved him inside.</p><p>The door swung closed as someone dumped a basket of laundry onto Nate’s head. While the clothes tumbled down around Nate, the basket stuck on his head, blinding him as he swung his arms wildly to fend off his attacker. “Don’t move,” someone shouted from the door.</p><p>“We got you now, criminal!” another person cried, only a few feet in front of him. “Now tell us who you are and what you’re doing here, and nobody gets hurt!”</p><p>Freezing a moment, Nate suddenly grabbed for his gun, and aimed at the first person he saw through the holes in the basket. He wasn’t expecting it to be some kid who looked barely fifteen, scrawny and wiry like a lost kitten. The other guy, a couple years older and easily bigger but apparently no less stupid, snagged the kid by the collar and hauled him back so that he now stood between the kid and the gun.</p><p>Nate’s eyelid twitched. “You two think this is funny or something? Jumping a guy in a laundry room?” Both pairs of eyes shifted from the gun in his hand to the laundry basket still hanging on his head, and Nate tore it off, throwing it at the bigger guy’s chest. “Who are you two numbskulls?”</p><p>The big guy used the laundry basket as a shield and frowned. “Hey, we asked you first.”</p><p>Nate just shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’m on the one holding the gun, so.”</p><p>“But we were here first!” the kid - he really couldn’t be older than Haylie - shouted over the other guy’s shoulder, and Nate had to count to ten, slowly and with feeling. But as he did, he started connecting a few dots.</p><p>He narrowed his eyes at them. “That’s your van outside, isn’t it? Big ugly white one?”</p><p>The bigger guy gasped as if he’d been slapped across the face. “I’ll have you know that the Barrel is a majestic beast of great girth and gentle, powerful beauty-!”</p><p>“No it’s not,” Nate snapped, feeling his blood pressure rising through the roof. “It’s big, it’s obnoxious, and it’s very easy to spot.” It was a wonder these guys hadn’t been picked out by the police already. A strange, unmarked van riding around and parking near the scene of the crime, that definitely wouldn’t raise any red flags.</p><p>The big guy, who was probably about Nate’s age, floundered uselessly while his little buddy jumped in quickly, his voice rising in pitch the more agitated he got, and that was saying something, “Well your car is... ugly! And just as conspicuous!”</p><p>Nate glared between the kid’s eyes like the youngster had just insulted him personally. To be honest, he had. The big guy, meanwhile, turned to look over his shoulder at the scrawny doofus and hissed, “It’s <em>inconspicuous</em>.”</p><p>“No, it’s not,” the twerp argued back.</p><p>“Yes it is, it’s incon-” The big guy shook his head like even he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. “It doesn’t blend in!”</p><p>“That’s what I said!” Then to Nate again, the kid muttered, “In fact, we saw it outside of Freddy’s the day that girl went missing! So, we’ll ask again. Who. Are. You?” With each word, the kid punctuated it with a shove to get his buddy closer until the laundry basket hit the end of Nate’s gun. The closer they got, the wider the scrawny one’s gray-green eyes got, too. “Hey, that’s starting to look real!”</p><p>“It is real, and it’s powerful. And if you two idiots don’t start talking, it’s powerful enough to blow you both right here, right now... Away.” Nate rolled his eyes at himself for that one - he was just glad Matt wasn’t here to see him floundering like this - while both the other boys stared at him.</p><p>The bigger one just pouted, tutting his tongue. “Well, there’s no need for name-calling.”</p><p>“You’re the one that’s poaching on our turf here, bud!” the younger guy cried, peeking his scruffy brown hair over his larger friend’s shoulder even though they were roughly the same height.</p><p>Nate’s eyebrows crept upwards. He would’ve assumed that they were talking about the hunt if they weren’t… well, if they weren’t the two chuckleheads he was currently staring at. The older one was bigger, but that wasn’t saying much. And neither of them were armed with anything more than the laundry basket Nate would guess. There was no way they knew what was really going on here. He gestured towards them with his gun, then. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”</p><p>“We were here first. We got dibs, so you and that partner of yours will just have to mozy on out of town!” The big guy had a voice like a TV announcer, and he was using every bit of it now to sound Large and In-Charge.</p><p>Confused but still determined, Nate raised the gun again as if to remind all three of them just who was really in charge here. “No! Look, whatever you’re doing here - or <em>think</em> you’re doing here - you need to step off. My partner and I already have this covered, and we don’t need two dunderheads like you getting in our way.”</p><p>Big Guy scoffed again. “What did I just say about the name-calling?”</p><p>A finger pointed at Nate from behind Big Guy’s head, and the squeaky voice returned even though he couldn’t currently see the scrawny kid. “Plus, we’re not going anywhere! We’re not hurting anyone, and we haven’t hurt you! You’re just being mean!”</p><p>“You shoved me into a laundry room and dumped a basket of clothes over my head!” Nate shouted. His patience was wearing thin, but he reminded himself that if he got arrested for putting two civvies in the hospital, Matt would never let him hear the end of it. Maybe if he just knocked them out...</p><p>“Fair, but it didn’t hurt you. And hey! At least they were clean!” Big Guy insisted with what might’ve been considered a charismatic smile under different circumstances.</p><p>“Ooh,” the kid looked down at the clothes at Nate’s feet and sniffed the air, “maybe they weren’t…”</p><p>“Listen, bub, you’re in on our job, and you need to ‘step off’ before we do something you’ll regret!” Big Guy slammed the laundry basket down on the floor among the heap of laundry and set his shoulders like he could somehow make himself look less like an idiot with all of two brain cells buzzing around behind his eyes.</p><p>“Oh, <em>you’ll</em> do something <em>I’ll</em> regret,” Nate raged. His brother was dreaming of a dead serial killer, had dragged him all the way here because he insisted said dead guy was somehow still alive, and now this. If anyone was going to do something they regretted, it was going to be Nathan Smith. He reserved the right. “I’d like to see you try!”</p><p>It was at precisely that moment that the woman from before opened the door to the laundry room and poked her head in. Nate stashed his gun behind his back so fast he thought he might’ve pulled a muscle in his shoulder, and both the chuckleheads jumped three feet in the air, spun around, and yelped at the woman.</p><p>She raised an eyebrow, certainly confused by finding three strange guys milling around in her laundry room. “Oh, sorry. I thought I heard yelling.” They had to be quite the sight, certainly with as guilty as Nate looked, the metal of his gun digging into his lower back. “Is everything okay here?”</p><p>“No!” the other two answered just as Nate muttered, “We’re fine.”</p><p>The three glared at one another, and the kid jerked his thumb towards Nate. “This punk isn’t here to help out at all! He’s just trying to start trouble!”</p><p>“That’s right!” the other one exclaimed, and Nate could hardly believe his ears. He was definitely about to get arrested. “He’s just here to spy on you and - and make sure you don’t find Haylie!”</p><p>Confused but honestly no longer surprised, Nate sighed and looked to the woman who seemed just about as lost as he felt. “Listen. They yanked me in here and threw laundry at my head. I don’t really know what’s going on, but if it’s too much trouble, I’ll just go.”</p><p>The older one turned on him, poking a finger into Nate’s chest. “We did that to stop you!”</p><p>“From doing what exactly?” Nate snapped. “Eating a Triscuit?”</p><p>“Enough!” the woman shouted and pointed her finger behind her. “Out, all of you! We don’t have time for this nonsense. Don’t any of you understand that a girl is missing?”</p><p>Filing out of the room like scolded children, the boys headed outside while Chad continued talking to the canvassing group that had just returned. Nate overheard them mention that, after going around door-to-door, they still didn’t have any clues as to what could’ve happened to Haylie. It seemed odd, he thought, that in such a small town, no one had a thing to say, no one had seen anything at all.</p><p>He sure hoped Matt had gotten some more information than he did.</p><p>Outside, he ducked his head and practically sprinted for the Firebird, but his two deranged ducklings were still after him. “Hey! Hey!” Mr. Announcer Voice shouted behind him, and the two idjits caught up as Nate paused to unlock his car.</p><p>“Yeah, short, dark and brooding,” the scrawny one leaned his hand against the T-top.</p><p>“You’re too small for that gesture,” Nate muttered at him and glared at the hand like he might cut it off until the kid took it off his car. He sighed and turned around to them, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. “What do you want from me?” Shifting awkwardly, the two of them stole glances at one another until Nate had finally had enough. “Hey, guys! Speak! I know you can!”</p><p>“Do you really care about finding Haylie?” the kid asked, his voice still accusatory as it had been back in the laundry room, but at least it didn’t come with the smell of sweaty socks.</p><p>“<em>That’s</em> why you stopped me?” He gestured back to the house. “Why do you think I was here of all places if I didn’t care about Haylie? My partner and I help people, which is more than you two can say. It seems you’re more worried about someone edging in on your ‘job’ - whatever that means - than you are about the girl.” He took the flier from his back pocket. “Tell me, do either of you know what tattoo Haylie has on her neck?”</p><p>The big guy opened his mouth, and the little one looked away.</p><p>Nate tilted his head to the side. “How about the color of her hair? Her eyes? What was she last seen wearing?” He unfolded the flier for them and pressed it into the younger one’s hand. “Maybe you should take a long look and ask yourselves why <em>you’re</em> really here.”</p><p>Finally, the big guy stepped in front of Nate again as if to shield the kid from Nate’s accusations, but he was still too short, still had a haircut that looked like a freaking shark fin of all things. “Look, we appreciate your... <em>advice</em>, okay? But just so you know, we got this covered. You and your partner can go wander your little patooties off to the next town, alright?”</p><p>“Unless you’re actually the killer! Then, don’t. Go turn yourself in!” The little one crossed his arms over his chest, too, and looked just like a pouting five year-old in the process. Nate rolled his eyes so hard he was half-worried they’d roll right out of his head.</p><p>After a long, deep breath, he blinked between the two of them and clicked his tongue. “So let me get this straight - my options are either leave town in the middle of a job I actually know how to do, or turn myself into the police for a crime that two steaming piles without enough sense to rub together are, for some reason, convinced I did?” He raised an eyebrow at them. “Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”</p><p>Neither of them answered, but then again, they didn’t need to.</p><p>Nate gave them another once-over and sighed. If he was lucky, maybe whatever this was wouldn’t be Afton at all and it would eat these two and save the world a lot of trouble. Reaching forward, a passive “don’t kill them” smile on his face, Nate tugged the flier from the short one’s hands and tucked it back into his pocket before he turned back to the Firebird, finally got his key in the door, and swung himself inside once he’d unlocked it.</p><p>“Wait, where are you going?” the scrawny one asked.</p><p>Big Guy pulled the kid back from the curb as Nate pulled the gun from his waistband and dropped it into its place in the cupholder. “Which option are you taking? Are you leaving?”</p><p>Ignoring them, Nate started the Firebird, and she growled to life. Even as he slammed the door shut between himself and the Disaster Twins, they continued to yell at him, more questions and accusations, and he was prepared to ignore them and drive away. But something behind them drew his gaze. A hallucination - but it wasn’t his old pal Charlie.</p><p>No, it was someone different, and Nate thought maybe he caught sight of a familiar tattoo on her neck. “Hello? Hello?” the meatheaded shouted, and Nate blinked up at him, gathering his thoughts.</p><p>He rolled down the window. “Look, just - stay away from Freddy’s.” If it was Haylie he was seeing - if her disappearance had something to do with that restaurant - Nate felt sick.</p><p>The little one was talking, saying something like, “We told you, we’ve got work to do -” but Nate wasn’t listening.</p><p>“And I’m telling you to stay away,” Nate interrupted him. “You two yahoos are walking into something you don’t understand, now just leave it to the professionals and <em>stay out of our way</em>.” With that, he took off down the road, as he fished around for his phone which had just started ringing.</p><p>Back on the curb, the kid snapped his fingers. “I knew it!” The other guy turned to him, staring as the kid beamed proudly. “He <em>is</em> the kidnapper!”</p><p>When Nate answered his phone and pressed it to his ear, he was already speaking, “Matt… you were right. It’s Afton.”</p><p>Matt, walking down the sidewalk away from the bank, and blinking into the sun, paused a moment before answering, “How do you know?”</p><p>“Because I saw her, man, the missing girl.” Nate’s stomach lurched again, and he had to take a deep breath, the scent of old leather and gasoline soothing his nerves just a little. He had to get back to the motel before he lost his lunch. “At least I think I did. She was a hallucination, just as jacked up as Charlotte has been since she came back.”</p><p>“You mean - physically?” Matt rubbed at the front of his head where the pain of a migraine was beginning to blossom. Sweat broke out over his skin, and he started to wonder if that banana he’d eaten for lunch was bad. He felt rotten on the inside, rotten and… cold.</p><p>“I don’t know. I couldn’t really see her that much.” Nate scanned the road ahead of him. People were still out going door-to-door, and he wondered if Chad would get any answers or if he, like so many others, would lose someone he loved to Afton for good. “But the hallucination itself, it’s like it’s got some kind of interference or something. Charlie’s been that way since I started seeing her again, and she’s never been like that before now. She’s also showing up way less frequently, so I don’t know what’s going on.”</p><p>For as long as he’d dealt with these hallucinations, Nate realized, he still knew next to nothing about them. Other than they were Afton’s fault, and it seemed like he was never getting away from them.</p><p>Nate’s thoughts were broken up by the sound of Matt crying out in pain.</p><p>Matt gasped as he stumbled a step. He pulled the sunglasses from over his eyes and dropped onto the grass beside the sidewalk, his knees hitting first and then both hands. His phone clattered along the pavement behind him. The pain in his skull had suddenly spiked until it was blinding. The whole world went dark around him.</p><p>Over the phone, Nate shouted, “<em>Matt? You okay? Matt!</em>”</p><p>His brother cried out again, clutching his head as something white and blinding came into focus among the dark. Flashes of hands typing at a keyboard, a gaping maw filled with bloodied teeth, a rainbow swarm of balloons, and a symbol, like a flower in bloom - they all burned like fireworks in his brain, a sudden, show-stopping, world-ending explosion, and then it faded.</p><p>Nate clutched at his phone, pressing it tighter to his ear like that might help. “Matt? Are you there? Matt? Matt!”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. To Market, to Market</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I wonder if we've yet reached the "I obsessively reread this particular passage bc it just Hits Right" stage yet.</p><p>I know I hit that stage with this chapter a long, long time ago.</p><p>Anyone else?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>
April, 2011</p><p>Distantly, Matt heard the Firebird approach and park across the road from him. His brother scrambled out, shouting his name. But Matt could only focus on holding his head together where it felt like it might crack open. His knees dug into the dirt, his back hunched over. When Nate sprinted across the empty street to reach him, he pulled Matt upright to get a look at him.</p><p>“Hey, big guy, you okay?” Nate asked, breathless, and prodded him urgently for injuries. “Matt, talk to me. Are you hurt?”</p><p>Matt shook his head gently and grabbed fistfulls of his brother’s shirt as his forehead fell forward to rest on Nate’s collarbone, grateful for his presence there. With his head spinning and his vision fading in and out, Matt was lost without something there to ground him in reality as Nate continued to feel around for possible injuries.</p><p>But there was nothing to find, and Matt knew it. Something was inside of him, crawling around in his veins and in and out of his aching lungs. Matt’s nose burned with the smell of an electrical fire, and the symbols, glowing and festering with something dark and terrible were there every time Matt closed his eyes. This wasn’t just another migraine from staying up all night staring at his laptop screen.</p><p>This was Afton.</p><p>Nate kept searching for an explanation, though. A scan of the street around them yielded nothing. There was no one around, no one watching, just the occasional passing car back on the main road behind them. He was clueless.</p><p>Matt groaned again, and Nate shoved down the panic rising in his chest.</p><p>He clasped his hands on Matt’s shoulders and squeezed them tight as he asked, “Hey, hey you with me? Can you walk?” He got a faint nod in reply, nothing more - Matt couldn’t put his scrambled thoughts together - and Nate stood slowly, swiping the discarded phone and sunglasses and slinging the heavy messenger bag over his shoulder.</p><p>“Give me your hand,” Nate said and caught Matt’s hands as he reached blindly for him. “Alright, on three. One - Two - Three! Up and at’em, big guy.” As Matt got to his feet, he tipped forward a little, and Nate all but propped him up, slinging one of Matt’s arms around his shoulders and widening his stance to accommodate his brother’s weight. “Easy there, easy. Lean on me.”</p><p>Keeping his fists clenched in Nate’s shirt, Matt groaned and shivered as everything inside of him was thrown off-balance. His head might be up and his feet planted on the ground, but he felt like he was rolling around in a hamster ball of death. Nate steadied them both. “I’m here, I got you.” He tried to search Matt’s twisted face, but all he could think of in that moment was that awful storage room, Matt tied to that chair beaten and starved, Afton breathing down their necks.</p><p>Nate squeezed Matt’s arm. “You good?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Matt nodded, his voice strained, “I’m good.”</p><p>Nate wrapped his hand around Matt’s wrist and his other arm around his waist. “Okay then, one foot at a time. Come on.” Stumbling together, Nate helped his brother cross the street to the passenger side of the Firebird. With one hand, he held Matt up, and with the other, he opened the door.</p><p>Some fancy maneuvering and a few muttered curse words later, Matt realized he was sitting in the seat, strapped in and ready to go, and Nate all but slid across the hood to get in on the other side and drive off.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Back at the motel a few minutes later, Nate kicked open the door to their room with Matt still hanging onto him for dear life. All of it seemed eerily familiar, toating Matt around while his brother was in so much pain he couldn’t see straight, and Nate hated to think this might become a habit. Finally, he shuffled Matt over to the nearest bed and dropped him onto it, as gently as he could manage. Then rushing back, he shut the door to the room and flicked on the kitchen light.</p><p>Matt groaned, throwing one arm up over his eyes.</p><p>“Sorry, sorry,” Nate muttered and searched Matt’s bag spastically. “Just a sec.” Grabbing a bottle of pills - the “Good Stuff” from Stephanie - Nate filled a glass of water and brought both to Matt. “Here, drugs.” Matt, with slitted eyes, gave him a half-lucid glare, and Nate shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “Doctor Cordy’s orders, bro. Just take ‘em.”</p><p>Groaning with the effort it took to push himself up to sit against the headboard, Matt accepted the water and the pills and swallowed both with no more complaints. Then, once Nate took back the glass from him, Matt slumped to the side, clutching a pillow to his chest and curling around it. Now he just felt like all his insides had been hollowed out with an ice cream scooper. No big deal, just your average, everyday, end of the world migraine.</p><p>Nate went back to the kitchen and refilled the glass, fishing in the takeout bag for a plastic straw. Hesitant as he returned to Matt’s bedside, Nate sat down gently on the bed and watched his brother’s face wrinkle and contort before slowly smoothing out as he got adjusted. “So, uh, what was that? You get stung by a Beedrill or something?”</p><p>Matt blinked his eyes once. Leave it to Nate to make a Pokemon reference when Matt felt like he had one foot in the grave and the other in a roller-skate. “Beedrill isn't psychic,” he muttered and rubbed at his face.</p><p>“Psychic?” Nate questioned as he unwrapped the straw and plopped it into the glass, handing it off to his brother as Matt made another attempt at sitting up straight only to make it about halfway and give up. He was avoiding eye-contact, and Nate knew that tactic. He’d perfected it. “Matt, talk to me.”</p><p>He watched his brother take a few sips of water and stare with haunted eyes.</p><p>Finally, Matt sighed and shifted positions again like he couldn’t quite get comfortable. His body just felt… <em> wrong </em>, and Matt couldn’t quite put his finger on why. “It was like... like I had a vision. But a vision someone else was cramming into my head.” He handed the glass of water back, cradling his head with both hands.</p><p>Nate swallowed. “You were… seeing things?” He waited for Matt to respond, waited for him to tell him that no, Nate had misunderstood somehow. But he didn’t do either. Nate plucked at the ripped knees of his pants and cleared his throat. “Wh-what did you see?”</p><p>Matt closed his eyes, concentrating. It took so much effort just to put together simple sentences, especially with his little brother staring at him like he might fall apart at any moment. “It was…” He reached both hands forward - God, how had Nate survived this long with migraines like this to deal with? “Hands at a computer? Typing something, I think. And then a - a mouth, but it wasn’t human, filled with teeth the size of my fingers. And a flash of colors, but they were shaped? I think they were round?”</p><p>“Colored circles?” Nate asked, not following.</p><p>Scrubbing his fingers through his hair, Matt sighed, tossing over onto his back. “Balloons, maybe? And then, a symbol of some kind, I have no idea what it was. Maybe a flower?”</p><p>Nate thought for a moment and then reached into his back pocket for the flier. “Here, did it look like this?”</p><p>Matt’s vision continued to swim, the picture fading in and out as he tried to focus. Until he finally made out the tattoo on Haylie’s neck. “Yeah, that’s it.” He let his head drop back again.</p><p>“I’m pretty sure I saw the same tattoo on the girl in my hallucination. That’s the only chance I had at guessing who it was.” Nate leaned one elbow onto his knee and glared down at the floor, the little cactus pattern spread out beneath his feet. “So what the hell, man? My hallucinations jumping ship and Jedi mind-beaming into your head now?”</p><p>Pushing himself up onto one elbow, Matt looked up at his brother’s grim expression. He didn’t have to guess what he was thinking. “It wasn’t a hallucination but - we don’t know what I saw.”</p><p>“You saw Haylie! You saw some mysterious hands, and balloons, and - and something that sounds a <em> lot </em>like an animatronic’s gaping jaw if you ask me.” Nate swiped a hand through his hair with one violent shake to his head. It couldn’t be happening to someone else, not his big brother, not when Nate could barely handle his own screwed up brain.</p><p>And Matt didn’t argue with him, just stared down at the bed and traced his fingers along the cactuses there. The longer he stared, the more out of focus they became, his eyes slipping closed. Nate turned back just in time to notice and snapped his fingers. “Hey, hey, stay with me.”</p><p>His eyes half-open and hands curling up, Matt whispered, “I think I was connected to the kidnapper, Nate.”</p><p>Stunned speechless, Nate edged backwards, staring down at his brother. “You… what?”</p><p>Matt finally made eye-contact with him again, his gaze still haunted, and Nate searched it for any hint of the evil that had burned behind them when he rescued Matt and again at his and Stephanie’s house. But all he could see was Matt’s own brokenness over the idea that somehow, through some kind of black magic, he might be connected to the person who took Haylie.</p><p>Matt cleared his throat and sat up slowly, his hand pressed to his abdomen. “I felt like something... something was <em> inside </em> me. Something gross and rotting, and <em> empty </em>. Like a cold void in the pit of my stomach.”</p><p>Nate looked up at him with a sharp jerk of his head. “What did you just say?”</p><p>“What?” Matt rubbed his forehead. What had he said? “A-a void, in the pit of my stomach?”</p><p>With a shaking hand, Nate set the glass of water on the bedside table. “Like a big, frozen ball of ice that’s... sharp all over and somehow... hollow inside?” Nate asked, struggling to put it into words. It wasn’t exactly easy to describe something that traumatizing.</p><p>Matt pulled himself together enough to focus on his brother’s eyes again. He hugged his arms around his middle. “What’s wrong? What does it mean?”</p><p>Rather than answer him, Nate got up from the bed and paced back and forth in the room. It was a beautiful day outside. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming, and Nate’s world was once again crashing down around his head. “Frozen and empty... that’s exactly what it feels like when a shtriga is feeding on you.”</p><p>The words hit Matthew like a ton of bricks. His face paled, and he felt himself tip forward again, hollow and wrong, just <em> wrong </em> inside. He should have known that feeling, of course, should have recognized it as Afton had licked on his soul for a week, and maybe he did, but hearing Nate recount the memory instead made his stomach bottom out.</p><p>Nate grit his teeth together, covering his mouth with his hand and turning away again. “What the hell is happening?” he asked softly, bitterly. “I thought this was over, why isn’t it over already?” He kicked over one of the chairs at the table and swept some of Matt’s notes onto the floor. His shoulders heaved with deep, shaking breaths.</p><p>Matt bit down on his lip. He watched his little brother pace, watched that weight settle back onto his shoulders again. “This is why you didn’t want to come,” he whispered, regret sinking deep into his stomach.</p><p>Nate laughed humorlessly, shaking his head, curling his fingers in his hair. “My whole life was crafted around finding that monster and killing him. And I did!” Silhouetted against the partially opened curtains, his shoulders sagged. “So why can’t I live my own life? Why is it always Afton? Why is it always Freddy’s? Why is it always dead kids filling up my head - and now yours too?” He paused, gulped in a breath, dropped his hands to his sides. “Why are we being punished for something we didn’t do?”</p><p>For all his genius, all his brains, Matt had no answers for his brother. He dropped his head into his hands with shame hanging around his neck, and a deep sigh twisted itself from his chest. By the window, Nate tore off his glasses, brushed the backs of his hands over his eyes, tousled his hair, and put his glasses back in place.</p><p>“We’ve got hours before it’s dark. I’m ordering some food.” He picked up his phone and his wallet. “You’d better check in at home.” And the door slammed shut behind him.</p><p>Alone and pissed, Matt grabbed one of the pillows from the bed and threw it against the opposite wall. “Damnit, damnit, damnit!” He brushed his wild hair back from his face and reached for his own phone, holding it in his hands and staring at it a moment. How was he going to tell Steph? <em> What </em>was he going to tell her?</p><p>He dropped onto his back and stared up at the ceiling as he dialed her number.</p><p> </p><p>At home, Stephanie had changed out of her work clothes and had just curled up on the futon with Skip who was purring happily in her lap while she petted him. When her phone rang, she bolted for it, spooking the cat in her lap who jumped up and ran into the bedroom. “Sorry, Skip!” She answered the phone without looking to see who it was. “Hey, Matthew!”</p><p>Her voice never sounded so beautiful. Matthew covered his eyes with one hand, a smile breaking over his face. “Hey, Stephanie. H-how was work?”</p><p>Steph could hear that something was wrong in his voice, the cracks beneath the smile. Instantly nervous, she twisted a lock of hair around her finger. “Oh, same old. But hey, I hear Logan is officially going to retire!”</p><p>Matt pressed his lips together, stifling more tears. “Oh yeah? Officially?”</p><p>“<em> Well, not ‘officially officially,’ but it’s what I heard anyway. </em>”</p><p>On shaky legs, Matt got up and staggered to the kitchen, taking his glass of water with him and pulling his legal pad from his messenger bag where Nate had dropped it on their way in. He flipped the pad open and scanned his notes while listening to Stephanie chatter about the gossip going around the office. He needed it right now, a little normal among the crazy.</p><p>“Wait, I thought those two were already dating?” he asked as he poked around in the takeout bag for any leftovers.</p><p>He could hear Steph rolling her eyes. God, he loved her. “So did we! But you know Brittney, she’ll make everything an event, even if it’s already happened before.”</p><p>Matt smirked. “Three times.”</p><p>Steph got up to check the oven where her mini-pizzas were cooking - and taking forever. Her stomach growled as she straightened up and wished for her old stove back in their house… But she chased that thought away and leaned one hip against the counter. “So what’s up? How’s Idaho?”</p><p>Matt took a long, deep breath as he pushed the empty takeout bag aside. “Uh, kind of dreary. For this place being called ‘Caliente’ it’s not very hot. Just muggy, you know?” He laughed a little, not an ounce of joy behind it.</p><p>Steph ducked back down and poked at the cooking mini-pizzas, hissing when she burned her finger. “Ow! Jeez.”</p><p>“<em> You okay? </em>”</p><p>“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little impatient to enjoy my gourmet dinner of mini-pizzas for one.” She sounded disappointed, but just the thought of it made Matt’s stomach growl. A banana did not a wholesome meal make. “I heard that. Have you eaten anything? Is Nate there? I know he’s not letting you starve. He can’t go two hours without eating.”</p><p>Matt pulled out his laptop and booted it up, grinning to himself. “Stephanie, you know I love you, right?”</p><p>Laughing - he loved her laugh, too - she jumped up on the counter and sat there, kicking her feet. “Yes, Matthew, I know that. I love you, too.”</p><p>The pause, the distance between them, felt like a gaping hole in Matt’s chest.</p><p>“Why in the world you would ever let me go on these stupid hunts I’ll never understand,” he muttered, his voice breaking again.</p><p>Steph paused as she pulled the pan of pizzas from the oven, but she continued to scoop them onto her plate and headed back to the futon where Skip had returned. She hissed at him to scoot over, and Skip stared at her blankly. So she gently encouraged him to scoot over with her foot. “You’re not really hunting, Matthew. And besides, I want this whole thing over with as much as you do, as much as Nate does.”</p><p>Matt glanced at Nate’s empty bed, feeling that emptiness in his chest expand.</p><p>“Plus, you’re helping people, so that’s, you know, a nice bonus.” Stephanie poked at one of the pizzas again. She knew she shouldn’t prod Matt for answers, but she couldn’t help herself. “Speaking of, how are things going? You figure out what it is, yet?”</p><p>Matt rubbed at the back of his head while he glared at the screen of his laptop, those symbols he’d spent the last few days obsessing over, that were coming back to life in technicolor. “Well, yes and no. One of the teens ‘investigating’ this place finally went missing-”</p><p>“Oh no!” Steph gasped.</p><p>“Yeah, a young girl, night before we got here. They issued an Amber Alert yesterday.” Matt tugged on his ear as he searched up the local news for the area. As soon as the page loaded, he was staring at a picture of Haylie Pena. “Nate talked to her boyfriend today, but I don’t know what he found yet. We also talked to her friends, the other kids that were there, and they said they saw something... interesting.” Matt sat back a bit, remembering the end of that video the kids showed to them. “Stephanie, have you ever heard of a yellow Bonnie suit?”</p><p>Steph, munching on her pizza and flipping through TV channels, paused and swallowed. “I don’t think so. Is there one at the Freddy’s there?”</p><p>Matt scrolled further down the page and read through the formal police report. It all added up to a bunch of nothing, which was all they’d found so far themselves. “We didn't see anything there ourselves when we swept it, but we saw it in a video. Apparently at least two of the kids were filming that night. Something was chasing them, and it looked an awful lot like Bonnie. But… greenish yellow almost.” Rubbing his eyes, Matt saw the flash, the snap of those jaws again, and he shivered from the cold burning inside of him.</p><p>Stephanie reached for her laptop that was sitting on the coffee table, and while balancing her plate of mini-pizzas on the arm of the futon, she opened the computer up and waited for it to wake up. “Well, I’ll take a look, but Nate is the local Freddy’s expert, more or less. How’s he doing, by the way? With all of this, I mean?”</p><p>Looking at the door, Matt sighed wearily. He couldn’t imagine what was going through Nate’s head right now, or maybe he could. “He’s a little freaked out. Okay, probably a <em> lot </em>freaked out, but you know him, he’ll never admit it.” Nate was as tough as nails, and as hard-headed as a brick wall.</p><p>“Of course he won’t.” Stephanie shook her head, glancing at her pizza. She’d suddenly lost her appetite. “Do you think we... did the right thing? Asking him to help you with this? I mean, hasn’t he earned his own life by now?”</p><p>Matt scoffed softly, just a little surprised. “It’s crazy how you two can be on the same exact wavelength sometimes. I’m starting to think you’re ganging up on me.”</p><p>“Why? Did he say something?” Stephanie asked, feeling like Matt was leaving some things out.</p><p>And Matt knew. He knew that she could read him like a book, even over the phone, but he wasn’t ready yet. Not yet, not until they’d figured things out. “I’ll tell you later, Steph.”</p><p>Deciding not to press any further - she trusted that he would tell her when he was ready - Steph typed away at her laptop until something caught her attention. “Huh.”</p><p>“What’s up?” Matt asked. He’d almost begun to nod off again, sitting there on the phone just listening to the sounds of Stephanie working. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend he was at home with her, just sitting on the futon beside her with Skip needling for attention.</p><p>“So apparently, there was a yellow Bonnie suit, as well as a yellow Freddy suit, from way back before Freddy’s was… well, Freddy’s. I guess it was a more local chain at that point? ‘Fredbear’s Family Diner’?” Steph pinched a pepperoni off the pizza and put it in her mouth, chewing slowly and trying to get her appetite back.</p><p>Matt scoffed again, this time with much less fondness. “How many different names did this franchise go through?” Not that it didn’t make sense when old Freddy had so much bad press to dodge.</p><p>“A lot, apparently.” Stephanie clicked through more search results until she found the location she was looking for. “And our favorite Freddy’s - where we went looking for you in Burbank - was... looks like it may have actually been a Fredbear’s Diner, too, at some point. Or had the suits for some reason?”</p><p>She scanned her eyes over some internet forum of Freddy’s fans, a whole club praising the chain that was the front for dozens of murdered kids. Steph couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “People online are calling them ‘Golden Bonnie’ and ‘Golden Freddy,’ by the way, the only original mascots from before Fredbear’s got bought out and went national.”</p><p>“So they do exist.” Matt wasn’t exactly thrilled at the news, but at least they had something to start with. “I wonder when they were at that Burbank restaurant and why?”</p><p>Steph pressed her lips together. “What do you think they were?”</p><p>Matt grabbed his laptop from the kitchen counter and went to sit at the table in the corner of the room instead where he could prop his feet up on one of the other chairs. “Well, you didn’t find any signs of missing kids at this location, so Afton likely never hit here. But all other signs are... loudly suggesting he’s related to whatever’s going on here in Idaho, so I figure the suit came from the Burbank restaurant.” He sat and leaned his elbows onto the table, lacing his fingers together.</p><p>“<em> What the… </em>”</p><p>Matt cocked his head to the side as he adjusted the angle of the laptop and reached around behind him to close the curtains against the last rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon. “What? What else did you find?”</p><p>Steph typed quickly and sent the link to his phone. “Check out the new hot ticket items on EBay right now.”</p><p>When Matt’s phone lit up, he checked it and followed the link to an EBay page filled with various Freddy’s equipment, toys, and souvenirs. Some of the larger, more menacing pieces sent shivers up and down Matt’s spine - sweet memories. “People are selling off pieces of Freddy’s? Where - where are they even getting these?”</p><p>Thinking as she chewed another pepperoni, Steph’s mind went back to those internet forums, hundred if not thousands of people raving daily about how much they loved Freddy’s. What must it have meant to those people to hear that the whole chain was suddenly closed? She scrolled through the listed items, and saw all the ones that were already sold, hundreds of pieces going for astronomical prices. It was astonishing.</p><p>“Maybe they went crazy when news got out about everything getting shut down. But look at all this! There’s prizes, toys, trinkets... They’ve got everything here, somehow.” Then she noticed something that made her blood run cold. “Matthew, look at the addresses.”</p><p>He did, and it only made him chew more and more at his lip. “They’re going nationwide. These things are coming and going from everywhere, every last corner of the country!”</p><p>Steph went silent for a while as she copied and pasted some more links to send to Matt. “I just found some things being sold out of Burbank.”</p><p>Matt massaged his temples, feeling that awful headache again, that cold and empty sensation returning along with it. “So the animatronic probably did come from there, after all.” He felt like something was chasing him, hunting him down, all the way from where it began.</p><p>“Yeah, it looks like it.” Stephanie leaned back as Skip bumped his head against one of her hands like he could sense her fear and wanted to comfort her. She pinched the bridge of her nose and scratched the cat behind his ears. “Matt, if Afton started… tampering with the animatronics years ago when he started killing all those kids…”</p><p>“Who knows what he could have done to whatever else was laying around,” Matt finished for her.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Nate returned to the motel an hour later, toting a bag of food and looking almost bashful. “Honey, I’m home,” he muttered and bumped the door closed with his hip as he crossed to the kitchen where he set down the bag and fished out Matt’s order. Meanwhile, Matthew watched him from the table, his laptop open and his pen poised above his legal pad where he’d been taking notes.</p><p>His eyes followed Nate as he brought Matt his food, setting it on the table beside him. Matt rubbed his face, inspecting the plastic container full of Chinese takeout, as Nate slipped quickly into the bathroom before his brother could make a comment about where he’d been all that time. When he did finally emerge from the bathroom, Matthew’s eyes were on him again.</p><p>Nate just went back to the kitchen to grab his own food.</p><p>“Nate, I’m sorry.”</p><p>A little stunned, Nate half-turned around to look at Matt. “For what?”</p><p>Matt gestured around with his hands, setting his pen aside. “For all of this. For your hallucinations coming back, for these - whatever I’m having. That it’s not over.” He took a deep breath. “I feel bad for you.”</p><p>Nate swallowed the awkward lump in his throat and shrugged his shoulders as he turned back to his meal. “It’s - uh - it’s not your fault, big brother. And you’re right, the sooner we figure out what’s going on, the sooner we can finally finish it.” He set his own food on the counter, popped the lid open, and stabbed his plastic fork into it. “Again. For good this time.”</p><p>Behind him, Matt slowly stood to his feet. “Yeah, that’s something else I feel bad about. Not, <em> bad </em> as in I feel guilty about it, necessarily, but bad for <em> you </em>.”</p><p>Nate just snorted to himself as he speared a piece of broccoli, popping it into his mouth and speaking around it, “Oh yeah? What’s that?”</p><p>“Well you’re right, it’s always Afton.” Matt drew closer, his voice soft and sympathetic. “It’s always Freddy’s. It’s always dead kids. It’s always your screwed up head, your sick, twisted psyche.”</p><p>Nate dropped his fork suddenly, his food stuck in his throat. He gagged.</p><p>Matt hovered behind him then. “It’s always your rotten motel beds and cheap diner food. It’s always your friends and loved ones, always heroic Matthew and sweet Stephanie, and responsible Jonathan, Reggie, Chuck, Ro, and your parents... and all those other friends you think - for some <em> delusional </em>reason - actually care about you.”</p><p>Nate struggled to swallow, struggled to breathe.</p><p>From behind, Matt’s hands brushed Nate’s arms, like a gentle reassurance, but the gesture was anything but calming as Nate flinched under the ghostly touch. Matt’s voice had changed. It now possessed a familiar sing-song quality, and Nate’s throat went dry. He could almost smell the smoke, feel the blood coating his hands</p><p>Flames roared in his ears, but a gentle voice drowned them out.</p><p><em> Afton</em>.</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Anybody home?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Man what's with all these cliff hangers? It's almost like we're doing them on purpose or something. Sheesh.</p><p>Thank you all for the comments! They really make our day, and I want to make sure you all never feel like we take them for granted. We certainly don't 😁</p>
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    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>April, 2011</p><p>“I do feel sorry for you, Nate.”</p><p>Matt leaned his head forward onto Nate’s shoulder as he went on, his curls brushing the nape of Nate’s neck, “But you know what really makes me feel bad for you is that you actually, honestly think this will all be over one day, that you’ll ever get to have a life that isn’t all about me.”</p><p>Matt’s hands curled tight around Nate’s shoulders then. His fingertips pressed deep into his skin as he spun Nate around and pinned him to the counter, his hands braced on either side of Nate. He tilted his head to the side, his eyes wide with glee. “It’s sad, Nate. It’s pathetic. But hot damn if it isn’t entertaining!”</p><p>Matt reached up then and brushed his knuckles down the side of Nate’s face, to the last of the fading bruises at his jawline. “You know, your little thread of hopes and dreams, it only makes me want to draw this out longer and longer and longer,” he growled, teeth bared, his mouth drifting near Nate’s ear. “And trust me, it’ll get so, so much more fun.”</p><p>He leaned back a step to enjoy every moment of Nate’s horror, his grin widening as Nate shivered under his touch, but dear little brother was frozen stiff - his gaze shifting wildly over Matt’s face, Afton’s eyes. “Oh, I have so many plans for you and dear Matthew,” he whispered and leaned in close again, “so many adventures for us to go on together where I can watch you two rip each other apart!”</p><p>He closed his fingers around Nate’s throat, and that finally snapped Nate out of his shock. He knocked Matt’s hands back, a violent shudder shaking his whole body as he shoved Matt across the carpet. And the moment he had an inch of leeway, Nate reached behind him for his hunting knife. He drew it and, without hesitating, aimed it at his brother who stared back at him. Only Matthew’s eyes were suddenly lucid and scared.</p><p>Scared of Nate.</p><p>“Whoa, whoa, kid. Take it easy.” Matt raised his hands slowly and backed away another step. “Are you okay?”</p><p>Nate stared back at him, nostrils flaring and jaw clenching as he tried to make sense of - of whatever just happened. His grip on the knife twisted and tightened. He didn’t understand.</p><p>“Are you - are you here with me?” Matt, without taking his eyes off Nate, reached for one of the lights to turn on and illuminate more of the room, as if that would chase away the demons in Nate’s head. “Nate, you’re here in the motel, with me. Caliente, Idaho, remember?”</p><p>Nate swallowed, his whole body twitching. Wired to attack. He knew what Matt was trying to do, ground him, chase away the hallucinations that must have sent Nate spiraling.</p><p>Had it all been a hallucination? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d felt one, wouldn’t even be the first time it had included Matt, but the way he had spoken, the things he’d said - for the first time in his life, Nate actually hoped he <em>was</em> hallucinating. Because for the first time, the alternative was so much worse.</p><p>“What was the last thing you said to me?” he demanded, his voice low and quivering.</p><p>Matt blinked. “What?”</p><p>“The last thing you said to me just now!” Nate shouted and watched his brother’s eyes, his hands, his body language, where he might try to strike and where Nate should strike back - a hundred things John taught him to spot in a potential enemy.</p><p>“Umm,” Matt started and glanced to either side of him. “I told you that people were selling parts of Freddy’s, including pieces from Burbank. Steph even found a yellow Bonnie suit, Golden Bonnie, all over the internet, and they were going all over the country, and... it had the possibility of making things a lot worse.” He raised his hands towards Nate again and tried to take a step closer, but Nate held the knife firmly between them, his head shaking.</p><p>“Nate, whatever you saw, it’s not real. It can’t hurt you.” Matt put a hand to his own chest, gave him a smile, small but sincere. “I’m real and I’m here, and it’s going to be okay.”</p><p>Nate blinked a couple of times, his stance shifting a bit, and he studied Matt’s eyes for what felt like an hour, for any sign of someone else behind them. But seeing no one but his brother looking back at him, finally he dropped the knife to his side, tucked it away, and turned back to the counter. His knees felt so weak. His head spun. Behind him, he heard Matthew shift, draw closer to him. “You okay? Are you… here?”</p><p>He reached out to touch Nate’s shoulder, and Nate flinched so hard he thought he might have bruised his hip against the counter. “Don’t touch me.”</p><p>“Okay,” Matt whispered, still confused, now a little hurt. Instead, he grabbed the takeout bag and fished out a fork to eat with, going back to the table in the other room to give Nate some space.</p><p>Leaning heavily into the counter, Nate tore off his glasses, stared with bleary eyes into the sink, and scrubbed a hand over his face. He took slow breaths, one after the next until he finally put his glasses back on, picked up his dinner, and dropped onto his bed. He glanced up at Mr. Spikes who smiled at him behind his tiny sunglasses.</p><p>Nate frowned. “What are you looking at?” He turned the lamp away from him and dug into his food, hardly tasting any of it as he shoveled it angrily into his mouth. He certainly wasn’t hungry at the moment, but the distraction was welcome.</p><p>Matt watched him in fleeting glances from the table. He felt lost. When they were kids, he knew how to handle the visions better than anyone. Matt could calm his brother, hold him together through anything, but now… “Do you want to talk about it?”</p><p>“No,” Nate snapped and stabbed some more at his food, slurping up noodles. Then he stood up, started searching around for something.</p><p>When Matt noticed, he smirked a little. “What are you looking for?”</p><p>“The remote,” Nate muttered as he dropped his hands to his sides in exasperation.</p><p>Sometimes, Matt thought, he was still that same grumpy little kid. “Table drawer.” Nate, confused, stared at the table where Matt was sitting. There weren’t any drawers… Matt noticed the unasked question and nodded his head. “Bedside table drawer.”</p><p>Nate looked behind him with a huff, grabbing the remote from the drawer and flinging himself onto the bed, only narrowly avoiding flipping the remainder of his plate of food. He started channel surfing while Matt drew back from working on his laptop and finished off the rest of his meal, still keeping an eye on Nate as he did.</p><p>It was spooky how quickly he could snap out of it sometimes, how well Nate could stuff his fear beneath the surface the same way he could eat a whole box of Poptarts in ten minutes flat if he felt like it.</p><p>“So,” Matt finally began once he’d thrown away his plate, “you never told me how the boyfriend was. Besides that he… cried a lot?” Matt was honestly struggling to remember their conversation over the phone before his head had exploded. How Nate ever dealt with this on a normal basis and managed to still function, Matt couldn’t begin to imagine.</p><p>Nate fidgeted, rubbing at the side of his face where there were still a few bruises left from their fight with Afton. “Yeah, he was... very distraught. But I figure the cops probably went to him first, and apparently he formed a civilian army to try to tear the city apart and find Haylie, so.” He chewed his bottom lip as Matt raised an eyebrow. “I’m serious, dude. Fliers, posters, the whole shebang.”</p><p>Matt picked up his leather notebook and studied it for a moment. “Oh yeah, I never told you about what I found at the bank!”</p><p>"The bank?” Nate questioned around another bite of food. He spit a little as he asked, “Why’d you go to the bank?” His eyes widened suddenly. “Did you rob a bank without me? Bro!”</p><p>“Wh- I didn’t rob a bank! Why would you-?” Matt said and cackled a bit in his chair, slapping his knee and shaking his head. “Look, it was for surveillance, my dear Watson. Big Brother’s always watching.” Matt pulled his phone out and pulled up the video he took of the security feed. Then he went to the foot of Nate’s bed, sitting down and holding the phone out for him to watch. He didn't miss how Nate studied his every move how a mouse studied a tiger. “2:03 AM: five teenagers arrive at the closed Freddy’s restaurant. They fiddle with the lock for a couple minutes and get inside.”</p><p>“They’re the ones that cut the chain we found at the front door,” Nate noticed, pointing a finger towards the screen.</p><p>Matt nodded and tapped his fingers along his knee as the rest of the video played. “Yep. They were in there for about forty minutes, and then at 2:57 AM they all came exploding back out the front doors, flashlights blaring. I’m assuming whooping and hollering.” Matt paused the video and pointed to one small figure in particular. “They scatter across the parking lot, but one never made it off the sidewalk.”</p><p>Nate watched as one small group of pixels turned and, with a pause, walked back inside the restaurant. “Haylie.”</p><p>“I’m assuming so.” Matt rewound the video a few seconds, paused again, and pointed towards the door where they could both see the person standing inside. “Someone was there with them. Someone physical.”</p><p>“Her friends said she made it with them all the way through the front doors, but they lost sight of her after that.” Nate scratched his head. It didn’t make sense, that was for sure, but he couldn’t deny what he saw with his own two eyes. “She... went back inside? Why?”</p><p>Matt shook his head back and forth, his mouth pressed into a frown. “I don’t know. But it looked voluntary. It’s hard to see on that copy, but I swear she looked around a couple times first, once she got out.” Matt swept a hand through his hair, pulling out a bit of grass from earlier. “Either way, it definitely looks like something or someone lured her back in.”</p><p>Nate pressed a finger over his lips and frowned at the tiny phone screen a moment more. “I’ve got nothing. That’s pretty weird.” He couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly go into a Freddy’s in the first place, let alone go back in after you were already chased out by something.</p><p>“But that means,” Matt said with a sigh, “that the last place we have officially seen Haylie Pena is Freddy’s on that night. She went in, came out, and then went back in, and never came back out again.” Taking the phone with him, Matt went back to his laptop where he could’ve sworn he saw a pair of big blue eyes flash across the screen as he dropped into his seat. He pecked at the mouse pad, but everything seemed normal.</p><p>“Did you see anyone else arrive on the footage at all?” Nate leaned back against the headboard, drawing his knees to his chest.</p><p>Matt’s eyes slowly moved up from the laptop screen like he hadn’t really heard the question. “No one we didn’t already know about. The teens, and then later, us, then the cops that evening.” He shifted again and wrote the eyes off as a trick of the light, lack of sleep making him see things. “But this is also just one camera from the front. There’s a whole back area behind the strip mall I couldn’t see. I also talked to the other neighboring shops before heading to the bank and none of their cameras saw anything either.”</p><p>Nate snorted a little and tugged at the lime green gauge in his ear. “Yeah, Freddy’s has never been a particularly big fan of security, believe it or not.” Slowly, he finished the rest of his meal, and as he set his plate on the bedside table, an idea occurred to him. “The others said whatever they saw in there wasn’t human. It was bigger and louder than any of them, and it was almost... talking? They definitely thought they heard a voice when they were skidadeling for the hills.”</p><p>“You think that’s what Haylie heard?” Matt sounded skeptical at first, but the more he thought, the more it made sense. “A voice she recognized, or that said something familiar enough for her to willingly go back inside?”</p><p>“Well, I know it wasn’t the Bonnie suit. Bonnie never had any vocal tracks, he just played guitar.” Nate did a little air-guitar motion and then rolled off the bed to go to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, talking over his shoulder, “And the other version, the one I saw - Mr. ‘Golden Bonnie’ as he’s known online - didn’t have any internal tracks or speakers either. They just moved and sang to overhead CDs. It wasn’t until the Big Five that they had internal speakers at all, and even then it wasn't all of them.”</p><p>Matt tilted his head back, the glow of the TV illuminating his face. They really needed to turn on some more lights before they both went blind. He watched Nate look down at the hunting knife still left on the counter, watched him tuck it away as he filled a glass with tap water. Since when had Nate started going around armed at all times? “So we have a puppeteer, maybe? Or... someone who is... using the suit to... scare kids?”</p><p>Nate leaned back against the countertop and sipped from his glass with both eyebrows retreating behind his fringe. “Someone using a Freddy Fazbear animatronic suit to terrorize children? Huh, why do I feel like I’ve heard that before?”</p><p>With an all but humorless chuckle, Matt went back to his research. There were so many seemingly disconnected bits of information that swirled in front of his vision, but he only came to a single conclusion as he stared at them, one that sat about as well in his stomach as the Chinese food was at that moment. “We should go back tonight.”</p><p>Nate looked at him quickly, swallowing. He looked like he’d been afraid Matt was going to say that. “You sure you’re up for it? Besides, the place is going to be crawling with cops, it was when I drove by.” He sounded a little too eager to be making excuses, but Matt figured it had something to do with the hallucination he’d seen.</p><p>“Yeah, it was earlier too, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.” Matt gestured down at his evidence. It was stacking up and not in their favor. “That’s got to be where Haylie is.”</p><p>“Then,” Nate said, hesitantly, “wouldn’t the cops have found her by now?"</p><p>Matt couldn’t help rolling his eyes, and Nate just shrugged in response, belligerent as ever. “Besides, no one knows Freddy’s like you. You could find a needle in a stack of needles if it’s a Freddy’s brand needle.”</p><p>Nate, not exactly flattered, smiled ruefully as he crossed back to his bed and sighed, “Well shucks, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.” He reached over and turned Mr. Spikes back towards him. “Looks like we’re back in the game, little dude.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Cutting the headlights as they turned onto the street, Nate pulled the Firebird around to the back side of the strip mall and parked behind one of the nearby shops. They got out quietly, the flash of police lights still shining through the buildings. When Nate popped open the trunk, they grabbed everything they might need. Matt slipped a gun and hunting knife into the holsters at his hips, and Nate added a tub of salt, lighter fluid, and a lighter to his bag.</p><p>“Just in case,” he muttered when Matt gave him a sideways glance. Always be prepared, Nate heard his dad muttering in his ear.</p><p>Together they snuck to the back of the Freddy’s where a rusted employee entrance was partially hidden behind a large, stinking dumpster. Nate knelt by the door and pulled out a lockpick as he noted the footprints. “More tracks.”</p><p>“Same ones from the storage closet,” Matt confirmed and glanced down either end of the strip mall to make sure they hadn’t been spotted.</p><p>Once Nate got the door open, they pushed inside, into the partial darkness with their maglights at the ready but not turned on. Instead, Nate pulled out the lighter and led them through the unusual, winding hallways to the front of the restaurant where they could see the police gathered outside the front windows. They knelt in the main hallway, watching.</p><p>“What are we hoping will happen that they won’t be able to stop?” Matt hissed through his teeth, and Nate shot him a glare.</p><p>“First of all, literally anything we deal with, they won’t be able to stop. Second, this was your idea!” He hit Matt’s arm, and Matt pushed back at him. They scuffled for a moment more in the darkness before a noise outside drew their attention.</p><p>The cops must have heard something on their radios because they all climbed back into their cars, sirens blaring, and sped off into the night. Nate blinked. “That was convenient for the plot-”</p><p>But a noise behind them cut him off, and both boys swiveled to look back down the hallway that they’d come down. Nate motioned Matt over to one wall, and he took the other. They checked each room that they passed until they reached the bathroom. Hearing voices from inside, they positioned themselves on either side of the door, and holding up his fingers, Nate counted down from three.</p><p>In one swift motion, Nate kicked in the door, knocking the person immediately inside off-balance, and Matt aimed his gun, ready for a fight. A chorus of shouts - surprised and angered - filled the small room, and Nate and Matt both flinched when someone shone a bright light in their eyes.</p><p>“Hey, knock it off!” Matt hissed.</p><p>When the light hovered on Nate’s face, one of the dark figures sighed. “Oh great, it’s Chuckles the Emo Clown.”</p><p>And to Nate, that voice was familiar. Before the idiot could react, Nate snatched the flashlight from his hand and turned it on him instead. Sure enough, it was the big moron from Chad’s house and his little dancing monkey buddy. They were covered in camera harnesses and sound equipment, wearing headphones over their ears, and Nate could’ve pounded both their faces in. “Dangit, you two!”</p><p>“You are the killer!” The little one practically hopped into the air. He was just as hyper-active as Matt when they were kids. “I knew it! You've come back to the scene of your own crime, probably to hide the evidence!” Suddenly there was a camera shoved in Nate’s face, and he pushed it back with a long-suffering sigh.</p><p>Matt clicked on his own flashlight and shone it around at the recording equipment and extra cameras set up around the room, then back to Tweedle Dee and Dum. "Uh, Nate, you know these two yahoos?”</p><p>“It’s my genuine displeasure to recognize their faces, yes,” Nate muttered, feeling his shoulders slump. He couldn’t catch just one break, could he?</p><p>“Hey, we’re not yahoos!” Fishstick protested.</p><p>Mr. Announcer Voice jumped in quickly, “Yeah! Clearly we’re Googles, the superior search engine!”</p><p>Matt thought he felt his IQ drop a few points just from being in the same room as them. “O-kay… Well, whatever you are, you need to leave.”</p><p>Nate looked to Big Brain, who he had hoped would have at least enough sense not to drag a literal child into what could possibly be a kidnapping or even murder investigation. “I thought I told you to stay away from this place!”</p><p>“Oh, like we’re going to listen to you!” he sneered back, waggling his fingers in Nate’s face. “You drive that stupid muscle car around, wear some cheap shades, and suddenly you think that everyone should just do what you say?”</p><p>Nate popped his lips and turned to Matt who looked too broken to comprehend what was going on. “I’m gunna kill ‘em.”</p><p>“Don’t,” Matt barely protested, more like a formality than any real concern he felt for these two, raising a hand in Nate’s direction while eyeing the equipment the other two were wearing. “You’re - oh, don’t tell me you two are vloggers! Really? You come to the restaurant where a teenage girl has actually gone missing just for the - the views?”</p><p>Nate looked around more, at all the gear they’d set up in this place. How in the heck had they gotten past all those police with this nonsense, anyway? Then suddenly it all made sense. “What the hell - this is the ‘job’ you were talking about?”</p><p>Thing One gestured around with his meaty hands like they were standing in a picturesque cathedral and not the graffiti-tagged bathroom of a rundown Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. “Hey, we’re making a documentary, over here, okay? Why, what are you doing? Streaming to MySpace?”</p><p>Thing Two sneered and poked a finger at Matthew. “Yeah, where’s your gear, ‘professionals’?”</p><p>Matt reached out, thumping at the kid’s nose until he backed off a step.</p><p>“Yeah,” the big guy continued, “I don’t see you organizing a fake phonecall to the police to clear them out of here!”</p><p>He and the squirt high-fived one another while Nate and Matt just blinked, their brains whirring like a computer on dial-up. Nate pinched the bridge of his nose. “There are people actually out trying to find that girl. Are you telling me that the only reason you were at that house today was to get footage for your ‘documentary,’ seriously?”</p><p>Matt looked at the mirrors painted with sloppy satanic symbols that looked as if they’d been drawn there by third graders with packets of fake blood, and his jaw dropped. “Wait, are you - you’re trying to summon the thing that took her? The thing that is behind a young girl going missing? You’re trying to summon it?” His voice had reached a whole new pitch, his cheeks going red with anger.</p><p>“Obviously,” the kid said, as if it were common sense to go poking around in summoning evil spirits - no big deal. “How else are we going to capture footage of it?”</p><p>“And use that footage to help find Haylie!” the other guy added after a short pause.</p><p>Matt rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling and took a deep breath. “Yeah, no doubt it will all be assembled together with some sensationalist title and put on, what, YouTube?” He said that last word the same way he might say “rat poison” or “rotten eggs.”</p><p>“Uh, yeah!” Big Guy laughed. He gestured to himself, flexing as he did. “I am Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach, and this is,” he said while gesturing towards the - again - literal child he brought with him, “Ethan ‘Crankgameplays’ Nestor. You may have heard of us. We’re kind of a big deal.”</p><p>Nate blinked, his voice deadpan, “Yeah, believe it or not, but we have better things to do with our time than spend it watching a bunch of egotistical airheads on the internet.” Grabbing the nearest one - Ethan, apparently - by the harness suddenly, Nate hauled him towards the door as Mark - the bigger one - protested loudly. He took Nate’s shoulder and pulled him off of Ethan, who slapped at Nate’s hands, stumbling a little under the weight of the equipment he was wearing.</p><p>“Hey! You don’t own this place!” Mark shouted in Nate’s face, and to Nate’s surprise, there was a hint of seriousness there, after all. “And for all we know, you could’ve been the ones that hurt Haylie!”</p><p>“So could you!” Nate shouted back and knocked Mark’s hand off his shoulder.</p><p>“We’re helping to find her,” he retorted, and Nate just made an “and?” gesture with his hands as Matt tried to step between them before this ridiculous fight somehow managed to get even louder in the middle of the building where a kidnapper and possible murderer might be hiding out.</p><p>He held up his hands. “Look, we’re trying to find her, too, okay? We want to figure out what took her, and stop it before it hurts anyone else, or worse yet, attracts more... social media gurus.” Sighing, Matt pulled himself up and tried to be civil. “Can you even begin to realize how dangerous this is?”</p><p>Over his brother’s shoulder, Nate hissed, “You don’t even care about her. She means nothing to you! Just a clickbait thumbnail and an eye-catching title for you to use to get more views!”</p><p>“Oh, yeah?” Ethan challenged as Mark drew closer to him. “And what’s she to you?”</p><p>Matt pressed his hands together, all but begging them to see sense. “She’s someone we are trying to rescue! Not capture on camera you - seriously tried to summon the thing that hurt her? Are you insane?” After all he and his brother had been through because of this place, these monsters, Matt couldn’t wrap his mind around someone wanting to use them for fame.</p><p>Ethan moved to make another protest, but Mark held up a hand to stop him. Matthew looked about ready to fight them both. Only before anyone could say anything, they heard a piercing scream ring through the building, the scream of a young girl.</p><p>Ethan’s head snapped up. “Haylie?”</p><p>They all poured out into the hallway to check for the source of the noise. While Mark and Ethan stared in the direction of the scream, Nate checked the other direction, his gut twisting up inside. Another hallucination of Haylie stood watching him with mournful eyes. “I don’t think that’s-”</p><p>The scream erupted through the air again, and this time, Ethan bolted off in the direction of it. And instantly, everything had turned into chaos.</p><p>“Ethan! Get back here!” Mark shouted after his friend.</p><p>But Nate grabbed him in time to stop him from following after Ethan. “No - no, stay! You don’t understand-” Then someone else bolted past him - Matthew.</p><p>“Stay here! Keep him out of trouble!”</p><p>Nate felt his heart jump up into his throat as he watched Matt disappear around the next corner in the hallway. “Matt, no!”</p><p>Mark struggled against Nate’s hold on him, and he was almost stronger with a few pounds on Nate to boot. “We have to go after them! Ethan-” He looked terrified at the thought of letting the kid out of his sight.</p><p>“Why and get ourselves trapped, too?” Nate hissed and tightened his grip on Mark’s arms.</p><p>“Trapped?” Mark questioned, his gaze darting from Nate back down the hall where Matt and Ethan had gone. “What do you mean?”</p><p>“I mean, it’s a trap.” He looked back at Haylie’s flickering form, and suddenly the hall seemed darker than before, the checkered tiles beneath his feet warping and bending. Mark almost threw him off, but Nate wouldn’t let go. If he did, he might fall. He barely registered Mark asking him how he knew all this. Nate growled, “Because Haylie is…”</p><p>He paused, and Mark turned to see what he was staring at. Down the hall, where Haylie’s form had once stood, a single green balloon hovered in the air. Nate shone his flashlight on it as dread filled his chest up tight. Mark squinted at it, making sure his camera was recording it as the balloon bobbed slowly towards them.</p><p>“Where the hell did that come from?”</p><p>Nate set his jaw. “I’m guessing not from Party City.”</p><p>Suddenly, Ethan’s voice called out to them from further down that hallway, a sharp, shrill, “Mark! Mark!”</p><p>“Ethan?” He sounded genuinely scared now, and again, Nate had to hold him back from immediately darting in the direction of the noise. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be Ethan. They’d gone in the complete opposite direction, but Mark wasn’t thinking straight all he heard was-</p><p>“Mark - hurry!”</p><p>“Ethan!” Mark elbowed Nate hard in the ribs, breaking his hold and sprinting in the direction of the voice.</p><p>Nate cursed, holding his chest and forcing a breath into his lungs before he started after the big idiot. “I hate influencers!”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Breathing hard under the weight of the equipment, Ethan sprinted through the maze of hallways, following the voice shouting, “Help! Please!” He could hear the other guy, the taller one, chasing after him. But he couldn’t stop. The guilt bubbling in his stomach was even worse than the feeling that he could barely breathe.</p><p>“Where are you?” he called out and paused for only a second.</p><p>Matthew caught up to him, doubled over and panting. “Ethan, we need to get-”</p><p>“Do you hear her?” he asked, spinning in a circle. He couldn’t tell which direction the voice was coming from! It sounded as if it were coming from all around them at once now. “Can you tell which way?”</p><p>Matt looked around at where they were in the building. He didn’t know Freddy’s as well as Nate, not the layout anyway, but he knew one thing was nearby. He backtracked a few feet until he reached the entrance to the main Party Room, the doorway draped with blue and pink streamers that brushed his face and hair as he pushed through them, Ethan close at his heels.</p><p>When he swept his flashlight beam over the room, Matt felt his breath catch in his throat. It was mostly empty, of course, just a few forgotten scraps of paper as it had been the other day, the beer can Matt had kicked across the floor, but as his light drifted up to the stage, Matt realized that the main curtains had been drawn back. Just as he realized what he was looking at, the spotlights overhead turned on, illuminating a table set with pizza and presents, confetti and cake. And at the center of it all - the guest of honor - a girl sat with her arms and legs tied to a chair, a “Let’s Eat” party hat strapped to her head.</p><p>Ethan gasped and bounded towards the stage, “Haylie!” as Matt was frozen, stock still, staring at it. At his own prison, his own worst nightmare, right where Afton had put him, tortured him, drained the life out of him for a week. He couldn’t look away.</p><p>And he felt rotted inside.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. You're Not Foxy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hey, folks! Keep an eye on the DMC blog because I've been in the mood to do some one-shot prompts if you guys are interested! I'll be busy Thursday and Friday, but I might do some today or Saturday? Just depending. Either way, let us know if that's something you all would be interested in doing. Becca has agreed to join in and flex her writing skills for us XD</p><p>-Reverse</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>
April, 2011</p><p>First it was one balloon, then three more, suddenly it was a wall of them, a myriad of colors dancing around their heads as Mark charged headlong into them, calling after Ethan. He swept the balloons aside with one arm only for a dozen more to take their place. A hand grabbed at his harness from behind and pulled him back as Nate sliced through the balloons with his knife, a chorus of loud pops filling the hallway.</p><p>Mark huffed but waited and watched as Nate cleared a path for them. “Oh, you carry a huge knife around, too? And where’s your gun, Civilian Cop 'Nate'? If that is your real name!” Without looking up from slicing through more balloons, Nate reached around, drew the gun from the waistband of his pants, flashed it at Mark, and slid it back into place. Mark nodded. “Got it. Good to know.”</p><p>Lost in the middle of a cloud of balloons by then, more colorful death omens filled up the hallway behind them, and if it weren’t for Nate driving them forward, Mark would’ve gotten turned around at least a dozen times. Finally Nate’s knife hit something hard and solid, a wall. Slipping the knife into its sheath, Nate pressed his hands to the wall and felt his way along until his fingers brushed against a doorframe.</p><p>“How did you find that?” Mark asked incredulously and batted a blue balloon away from his nose. He stared at Nate, who couldn’t be any older than he was, and began to realize, with a sense of growing fear, just how out of his depth he was.</p><p>Nate swung the door open with a withering glare in Mark’s direction. “Hi, I’m Nate. Vengeful ghosts, haunted Freddy’s, missing kids - it’s kind of my life.” He glanced Mark up and down, wondering just how much of a chance this guy had of making it through the night. “You want the full bio, or can we figure out what’s going on here?”</p><p>Mark adjusted his glasses. “Look, I’m sorry-”</p><p>“You can apologize for accusing me of kidnapping and or murdering a teenage girl later,” Nate muttered and pointed his flashlight inside the next hallway. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever been accused of in his life, after all. “And maybe you can buy me a drink, too. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.” He hooked a finger in the front of Mark’s harness and tugged him along behind him as Nate slipped into another hallway of dark party rooms and silent arcades.</p><p>“Ethan?” Mark whispered as they walked, but Nate had a terrible feeling that they weren’t following the kid. He grit his teeth and regretted letting Matt out of his sight. He should’ve gone after the gangling idiot, no matter what.</p><p>Then the voice returned, still calling for Mark, still cut through with terror like the kid was about to be eaten, and it came from the balloon-filled hallway they’d just left. Mark turned to go back the way that they came, but Nate managed to grab him in time. “Nuh-uh. No way.”</p><p>“But Ethan is back there! He needs me! Can’t you hear him?” Mark hissed, and Nate could see the desperation of an older sibling trying to protect their kid brother - he’d certainly seen it in Matt enough to spot it.</p><p>“Sure, go back and find whatever is mimicking him, walking into the obvious trap that is going to leave you disoriented and easy to pick off.” Nate gestured further down the hallway they were currently in. “I’m going to go figure out what that thing doesn’t want us to see.”</p><p>Mark knocked Nate’s hand away, but he didn’t try to run back towards the balloons. Fear made his blood run colder the longer they were in this place, the longer he knew Ethan was lost somewhere else in the maze, and he’d rather be with the possible-maniac with the gun rather than the unknown maniac who could produce balloons at an alarming rate. Somehow one was just more comforting than the other. But still, he muttered, “Is everything a trap with you?”</p><p>“In this line of work, yes, it’s safe to assume everything is a trap.” Nate paused long enough to flash Mark a proud smirk. “Which is why I’m still alive. So this is your lucky day.”</p><p>From the end of the long, dark hallway, they heard voices drift towards them, and goosebumps rose along Mark’s arms. Nate took them forward slowly, drawing his gun and holding it level with his flashlight as they came to what looked like the security office for this location, though it was somewhat unlike any Nate had seen before. Mostly because there was no door, only a desk with multiple monitors displaying security feeds from around the restaurant, a large, open vent on either side, and a perfect view down the hallway they’d just entered by.</p><p><em>All the better to see hundreds of pounds of teeth, metal, and certain death pouncing at you</em>, Nate thought grimly.</p><p>They circled around the desk to see the computer screens. It all looked pretty standard for the night shift set-up, except for one monitor that was full of command prompts, a sort of computer script that Nate squinted at. “What the-”</p><p>Mark pointed at the screen, specific boxes of text that he recognized. “These are remote control commands.” Nate frowned up at him, and Mark shrugged his shoulders. “What? I was almost an engineer!” Then something else on one of the other screens drew his attention. “Wait, is that Ethan?”</p><p>Through one of the security cameras, they could see the main Party Room with its stage, and sure enough, Ethan was crouched beside a girl tied to a chair - Haylie. Nate spotted Matt a few feet away, looking around at the rest of the room. But there was something else, too. Another feed, this one moving, almost like it was walking, and it was headed in Matt and Ethan’s direction if Nate was correct.</p><p>Again, Mark tried to scurry off after his friend, and again, Nate caught him by his harness. “Hey, hey, cool it, Markle Sparkle!”</p><p>“I’ve got to go help!” Mark gestured down the hallway. “They found the girl!”</p><p>Nate shook his head and reached out to flick the camera mounted on Mark’s chest. “And what are you going to do? Get some footage for your B-roll? You wanna help?” He pointed back to the computer screens, specifically the one that showed the moving video footage. “Look! That’s not a security camera we’re looking through. That’s something at eye level. There is something out there with them, something that is likely taking orders through these computers.”</p><p>He went to the other screen, the one full of computer commands and turned it towards Mark while he pulled the chair out from the desk for him to sit down. “If you know what system this is, you can try to stop that thing before anyone takes on a seven foot tall killer robot rabbit and gets their frontal lobe bitten off!”</p><p>Mark blinked for a moment, his nose wrinkling up. “That’s not possible!” Nate raised an eyebrow, dared him to question his knowledge again, see where that got him. Mark’s eyes widened. “Wait - seriously? How do you know all this stuff?”</p><p>“I was the Uber driver for a bunch of animatronics.” Nate pointed to the chair. “Now sit down and put that giant head of yours to the test!”</p><p>But Mark took a step back, his hands held up between himself and Nate. “Hey, I’m not like you, man. I’m just a YouTuber who makes stupid documentaries. I don’t even have a thousand subs!”</p><p>Nate opened his mouth to say - well, he wasn’t sure what - something that would make this guy help him because there was a frightened girl and a stupid kid and Nate’s equally stupid and probably frightened brother out there who needed them, but another noise echoed down the hallway, a child’s voice. It stopped him short. Something scuttled along the edge of the darkness where his flashlight couldn’t reach, and the voice came again, a small, questioning, “Hello?”</p><p>For a moment, it crossed through the beam of Nate’s maglight before disappearing again, a streak of red and blue, and Mark jumped in surprise.</p><p>Nate shook his head. “We’re not supposed to be here.”</p><p>Quietly, glancing at Nate from the corner of his eye because he was too frozen with fear to move, Mark whimpered, “Wh-what do you mean we’re not supposed to be here?”</p><p>Nate aimed his gun down the hallway, watching the edges of the beam of light for anymore movement. “Ethan’s screams? Those balloons? They were all a distraction to keep us out of this room.”</p><p>“Distraction?” Mark asked as one of the vents to their right reverberated with the sound of something crawling around inside. “Oh God, what is it?”</p><p>“Well, this is the security office,” Nate began, “so that would be-” A single red balloon drifted down the hallway towards them as the noises in the vents ceased, and Nate readied himself for a fight. “The night shift.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Haylie watched Ethan untie her with wide, bloodshot eyes. As he loosened and pulled the ropes away, he spoke to her softly. “Hey, it’s going to be okay now. It’s going to be alright. We’re going to get you out of here, miss.” Then, glancing over his shoulder at Matt, he called out, “What are you doing back there? Come help me!”</p><p>Matt slowly made his way towards the stage, and as he climbed the steps, he saw on the floor around Haylie’s chair a circle, a ring of sigils that sent a flash of painful memory through his brain. His breathing picked up, became rapid and shallow, and soon he was digging his fingernails into the skin of his palms to keep himself from falling too far down the rabbit hole of haunting memories. He didn’t have time for this. He had to hold himself together.</p><p>Once Ethan had Haylie untied, Matt undid the gag in her mouth and slipped the party hat off her head. Tears fell down her face, and she managed a clenched sob and a small, croaking, “Thank you.”</p><p>Ethan, who was still knelt down beside her, held her shoulders gently. “You’re okay. You’re safe now. We’re going to get you home, aren’t we?” He looked up at Matt who was still shell-shocked, breathing a bit too hard.</p><p>It was all too familiar, his nightmares made real.</p><p>But he smiled at Haylie and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I’m Matthew, and this is…”</p><p>“I’m Ethan,” he told Haylie with a smile. They were the same age, he realized, and Ethan’s stomach twisted at the sight of the bruises and rope burns on her arms and legs. Someone really had taken her, and the guilt he felt before only weighed heavier on his chest now that he saw Haylie for himself.</p><p>“We’re not alone,” Matt warned him as he turned to look at the rest of the room again. “We need to get out of here now.”</p><p>Ethan shook his head, still looking up at Haylie. “Look at her. She can barely sit up! We can’t expect her to walk out of here with us. We should call-”</p><p>Matt held the gag up to Ethan’s face as if to remind him that someone had to have tied it in the first place. “Whose voices do you think we were hearing? Haylie couldn’t scream that loudly through this. Someone else made that noise.” Slowly Ethan realized, and his eyes darted around the room, too. Matt drew the gun from his waist. “Get her out of here.”</p><p>With a nod, Ethan looked back to Haylie. “Hey, I’m going to help you up now, okay? Is that okay?” Haylie, barely suppressing sobs, nodded her head and let Ethan take one of her arms around his shoulders. He wasn’t much bigger than she was, maybe only an inch taller, but even though he was slight, he was also strong.</p><p>As Ethan helped Haylie walk, Matt jumped down from the stage and went to the steps to spot them in case either of them stumbled. Once they made it down, Matt helped to take some of Haylie’s weight. They had almost made it to the hallway when something ran past the doorway in a streak.</p><p>Matt aimed his gun, and Ethan stumbled when Haylie’s weight suddenly fell on him again. They all froze then as a short, round figure waddled into the room, stood in the doorway, and stared up at them with big blue eyes. “Hello!”</p><p>“H-hi?” Matt said, blinking. “Since when-? Why is there a…?”</p><p>“Balloon Boy!” Ethan giggled, but Haylie scrambled backwards at the sight of the round robot. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, Haylie. He’s just a little guy,” Ethan said, trying to comfort her.</p><p>But it wasn’t the little one that scared Matt, it was the sound of heavy footsteps approaching quickly down the hall, and suddenly he shoved Ethan and Haylie backwards, shouting, “Run! Run!” as a giant Golden Bonnie suit sprinted into the room.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The main hallway was quickly filling up with more balloons as Mark sat down at the security desk and started typing. Nate grabbed the whirring metal desk fan and pointed it down the hallway, keeping the balloons at bay for a moment. He grinned, eyebrows waggling. “Dude, I’m Captain America!”</p><p>“How?” Mark asked, barely glancing up from the screen to raise an eyebrow at Nate whose shoulders slumped when he realized his joke had fallen flat. A louder bang sounded above their heads then, and it dented the exposed metal of the vent in what looked like the shape of a fist.</p><p>Nate set down the fan and aimed his gun upwards as more of the vent system dented underneath the weight of whatever was up there. “Anytime you want to drop that sweet ‘Hacker voi-’”</p><p>“I got it!” Mark shouted, and Nate rolled his eyes.</p><p>“That’s not the line…”</p><p>The noise of typing grew louder as Mark switched from feed to feed, desperately trying to figure out exactly what was going on here. “Holy geezums, there’s so many things in this place wired up remotely!”</p><p>While he was paying attention to Mark, one balloon floated closer, brushing against the side of Nate’s head suddenly, and he screamed, nearly throwing himself to the floor and knocking it away with his gun. Mark snorted. “It’s just a balloon, man.”</p><p>“Yeah, and in about ten years we’re gonna have a global helium shortage! I’m doing my part now!” Nate growled as the banging in the ceiling quit all at once, and he batted another balloon from his face in agitation, wondering why it had gone silent. He glanced at Mark again, voice low, “Tell me that was you.”</p><p>Then the thing in the vents retreated down the hall in a burst of noise. A ripping, tearing screech of metal sounded down the hallway, and something crashed from the ceiling to the floor, scattering balloons in its wake. Nate turned, shining his flashlight, and caught sight of something through the balloons. It looked like a pile of metal and plastic, amorphous and strange until it twisted itself, locking pieces into place.</p><p>“What is that thing?” Mark asked, his hands frozen at the keys.</p><p>It sprang into action, then, its back end dragging in a twist of piecemeal parts as it crawled on its belly in their direction. A flicker of unnatural and lightning-fast motion, and both boys screamed.</p><p>“What the hell! What the hell!” Nate shouted as he fired at the creature. But it was almost impossible to hit as it slithered forward and sprang suddenly at him, hitting him square in the chest and knocking the breath from his lungs.</p><p>Nate grabbed his knife as he fell and struck towards the thing’s - Mangle’s, he realized - head, but he missed by just a few inches, sinking the blade into a portion of the neck instead, as they both tumbled to the ground. Using his full body weight, Nate threw Mangle off of him, and the creature swung wildly towards the security desk. Computers flew everywhere. Some part of Mangle’s body cracked Mark in the side of the head. He hit the ground hard.</p><p>Finally Nate managed to pin the killer scrap-heap beneath him and plunged his knife into its head with a sharp twist, cracking through a layer of plastic to get to the thing’s brain - which, to Nate’s surprise, was full of brand new wiring. But nothing seemed to stop it.</p><p>“A little help if you don’t mind!” Nate shouted over his shoulder while the creature bucked and fought beneath him.</p><p>Mark sat up, blinking stars and tears from his vision, and he looked at the destruction the metallic beast had caused. The computers lay in pieces around him. “No, no, no, no!”</p><p>Another head, one that Nate didn’t even see before, worked its way out of the spaghetti pile of parts and snapped at Nate with its metal teeth. He barely managed to block with his arm before it took his face off, and he wailed as the teeth broke through his skin, down to the bone. He wedged his knife into the thing’s jaw to try to get it off of him before it twisted his arm off, but suddenly Mangle released him, drew back, and stood onto what might generously be called back legs and froze in place, idling.</p><p>Nate, stunned and a little dizzy from the impact, looked back towards Mark who knelt on the floor, stooped over a single laptop that had survived the onslaught. Mark’s head snapped up to look at Mangle in shock.</p><p>“I did it! I did it!” He held the laptop over his head, bouncing a little until he nearly dropped it. Nate felt his heart stammer. And wincing, Mark set the laptop back on the ground. “Sorry, sorry.”</p><p>With a huff, Nate rolled his eyes and let his back hit the floor in relief.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Matt pulled both kids to the ground as a massive animatronic arm swung at them, and then pushing them back up again, he forced them farther back into the room. “Other way! Go the other way!” he shouted and kept his gun trained on the Golden Bonnie suit as it glared at him through the darkness, its teeth snapping and chattering.</p><p>Ethan yelped suddenly when he noticed another figure had entered the room, and Haylie screamed, hiding her face in Ethan’s shoulder as he held her tight. The figure loomed closer, and Matt turned, switching the gun back and forth between the two approaching threats.</p><p>A voice, almost familiar to Matthew, but he couldn’t place where he’d heard it before, called, “Stand down, Springtrap.” And the Golden Bonnie lowered its arms to its sides.</p><p>Matt grit his teeth, aiming at the figure. “We don’t want any trouble! We just want to take the girl and go.”</p><p>“W-with all of our heads and limbs attached, please!” Ethan shouted and pressed a hand to Haylie’s hair to comfort her.</p><p>“Right.” Matt shifted his grip on his gun. It had been a while since he’d held one, and his hands shook. But the figure only drew closer, and suddenly, he stepped into the light of Matt’s flashlight. Matt jerked his head back. “Mr. Hawkins?”</p><p>The young teacher was dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing when they were at the school earlier that day, only his button-down was open, exposing the oil-stained t-shirt underneath. And now he was toating a rusted crowbar, a crazed look in his eyes. He tilted his head in curiosity as he observed the rag-tag rescue team, and a grin broke across his face.</p><p>“Stop!” Matt demanded, his voice raising a pitch. “One step closer, and I’ll shoot you. I sweat to God!”</p><p>But Hawkins didn’t look afraid. In fact, he looked awestruck. He reached a hand out towards Matthew. “You’re, Mr.-”</p><p>“Mr. Cortez, Matthew Cortez, yes,” Matt confirmed with a nod, but Hawkins shook his head, still coming closer.</p><p>“No, no.” He laughed and shook a finger at Matthew. “You’re Mr. Afton!”</p><p>Matt froze. His eyes widened. “Wh-what did you just say?”</p><p>Hawkins looked overjoyed, and the closer he got, the more he stooped, looking up into Matt’s eyes in wonder. “Mr. Afton, you came! I knew you would!” He gestured around, especially towards the stage area, and Matt stepped between him and Ethan while Ethan shifted Haylie behind himself. “I’ve done all that you’ve asked me! Even the spell! You chose the right person to do it, too. None of my colleagues could have!” Hawkins laughed as his head shook. Still he never stopped staring at Matt as if he were his patron saint.</p><p>Patron saint of animatronic-obsessed, crowbar-wielding, narcissistic child-murderers, but still, a saint nonetheless.</p><p>“Um, Matthew? Who is the guy?” Ethan asked from behind Matt’s back, his voice wavering a bit as Haylie clung tight to his shirt, shivering.</p><p>But Hawkins either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. He was swept away, enraptured. He pressed his hands together around the crowbar, fingers folded as if in prayer, and all but got down on his knees. “And, Haylie, she’s perfect! Bright, youthful, full of spirit, but no one would know if she vanished! Take her! She’s yours!”</p><p>Matt heard Haylie give a shrill scream of fear muffled against Ethan’s shoulder, and his skin crawled at the mere thought of what Hawkins was implying. “What the hell are you-?”</p><p>“Hey!”</p><p>Hawkins turned, but Matt didn’t need to look to know who it was. He dragged Ethan and Haylie to the ground with him as Nate unloaded his clip into Springtrap. Haylie screamed and wailed at the top of her lungs, pressing her hand over one ear and clinging so tight to Ethan’s arm with the other that he was starting to lose feeling in his own hand. In the chaos, Hawkins staggered forward and grabbed Haylie from Ethan.</p><p>The boy reached after her, but Hawkins was bigger, stronger. He dragged Haylie away from them, back towards the stage. Once Nate’s clip was empty, he stared at the scene before him, Mark peeking out from the doorway behind him, the laptop clutched to his chest. Shot full of holes but apparently no worse for wear, Springtrap turned to stare emptily at him. If there was ever anyone inside, a soul inhabiting the rusted shell, Nate couldn’t tell right away. Then looking past the animatronic, he saw Hawkins with an arm around Haylie’s neck, and he had to do a double-take.</p><p>Matt stood to face the teacher, raising his hands to either side of his head. “Let her go, please.” He took a step closer to Hawkins, and Nate felt his heart hammering in his chest as Matt spoke. “You don’t have to do this.”</p><p>“Matt!” Nate called, but his brother just gestured behind him, for him to take the others and get out of there. Nate felt his chest spasm with indecision before he ducked around Springtrap and grabbed Ethan up from the floor. They were nearly out the door and back in the hallway when he heard-</p><p>“But I did all of this for you, Mr. Afton!”</p><p>Nate spun around, jaw dropping, as Mark grabbed Ethan from him. Matt slowly dropped his hands to his sides. “I am <em>not</em> Mr. Afton,” he insisted.</p><p>Hawkins bared his teeth, tightening his grip on Haylie’s neck as she sobbed. “Sir, I’d recognize you anywhere! Here - I’ve got the perfect child for you!”</p><p>Matt’s hands curled up tight. One of them still clutched his gun. “I said I am <em>not</em> Mr. Afton!”</p><p>“I couldn’t believe it when I first heard your voice,” Hawkins continued with a quivering smile, “that I would have the <em>honor</em> of working for you! Or choosing your next victim!”</p><p>Matt raised one hand to his head, his voice cracking with anger. “Let her go, Hawkins!”</p><p>“But I did it! She’s yours!”</p><p>“I said, let her go!” Matt screamed as he reached a fever pitch, the gun in his other hand shaking.</p><p>Hawkins was like a child, lost as to why his hero wasn’t pleased with what he’d done. “But why?”</p><p>Nate watched Matt’s body language change, then, the subtle shift in his shoulders and the way he held himself, and when he spoke, his voice was calm, casual, a smile on his lips, “Why? So, I can devour her soul, obviously.”</p><p>Nate felt his heart drop. “Shit.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Guy Must Know Some Kind of Black Magic</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Still doing prompts over on the blog! Send them in :)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Caliente, Idaho</span>
  <span>
    <br/>
  </span>
  <span>April, 2011</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Without turning his back to Matthew and Hawkins, Nate started shoving Ethan and Mark back into the hallway as Springtrap snapped to life and bore down on them. As he reached the hallway, he pointed the boys towards the door. But before he could react, Nate felt something grab his collar, and Springtrap threw him across the room into a wall where he slid to the floor, motionless. Mark’s fingers skittered across the laptop’s keys as Mangle appeared at one end of the hallway.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ethan screamed, running in the opposite direction before Balloon Boy appeared before him and tripped him up, with a chipper, “Hi!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark turned in time to see Mangle sprint at them, down on all fours, and scrambling backward, Mark tripped over Nate and hit the ground right at Springtrap’s feet. The laptop flew from his hands, cracked hard on the tile floor, and skidded a few feet away. Mangle launched itself over Ethan, tackling Balloon Boy as he said one last, “Hello!” Mangle ripped him to shreds, spitting out chunks of plastic and more new wiring.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ethan sat up with a single, half-crazed laugh. “Buh-bye!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Then Mangle turned on him, its huge jaw hanging open, and seeing its next target, it roared with a horrible, metallic scream.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Inside the party room, Matthew took Haylie by both her wrists, holding her up and looking her over with cold, calculating eyes as she shrinked in on herself, sobbed and pleaded, “Please! Please, I just want to go home!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Matt grimaced and tossed her aside like trash. Haylie fell to the ground with another pained shriek, and Hawkins looked down at her, distraught.  “I - I don’t understand!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sighing, Matt tossed his gun aside and drew his knife instead. It shone wickedly in the stage lights, and Hawkins swallowed hard as he took a step backwards. Matt drew closer. “I said I wanted someone with a lot of </span>
  <em>
    <span>spirit</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Hawkins. Not just any kid who takes your Religion class.” He grabbed Hawkins by the throat, and in one swift motion, dragged him forward, the point of the blade nicking the skin of his neck as the knife glinted. Then, as if realizing for the first time the darkness of the metal, Matt grimaced and dropped it quickly. “Iron… I </span>
  <em>
    <span>hate</span>
  </em>
  <span> iron.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Behind him, Ethan and Mark hurled curses and threats as Springtrap forced them forward with one massive hand gripping their skulls. Once it had marched them up to Matt, the rotting animatronic forced both boys to their knees. Matt clapped his hands together with a sudden laugh. “Now this is more like it!” He looked from one to the other, sneering at Mark. “Too old.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But when he set eyes on Ethan, tears streaking down his cheeks even as hate burned in his eyes, Matt beamed wickedly. He took Ethan’s chin in his hand and tilted his head side to side. “This one is just right! Hawkins!” The teacher scurried over like a dog, and Matt rolled his eyes in disgust, flicking a dismissive hand towards Mark.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Hawkins raised his crowbar and cracked the side of Mark’s head, his body hitting the ground with a thud as Ethan screamed and fought against the hold on his hair. “Mark! Mark!” Hawkins grabbed underneath Mark’s arms to haul him away, and Ethan continued to thrash. “Let him go! Let him go you - you monster!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Metallic fingers unlocking from their death grip, Ethan had one moment of freedom before Matthew’s hand closed around his throat, and he hauled the boy to his feet and pinned him to Springtrap’s chest with a gleeful smirk. “What, no apology?” He tilted his head to the side, inches from Ethan’s face. “It’s not nice to call people ‘monsters,’ you know.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Ethan spat and reached up to try to pry away the hand around his neck, “not when that’s what they are!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Matt’s grin only grew, a cheshire cat smile. “Good! Because guess what!” He threw Ethan to the ground and snapped his fingers. At that moment, Springtrap’s body popped open, revealing the inner compartment, hidden among the spring locks in its chest, just big enough to hold a small person. A big, glowing sigil had been branded on the interior of the cavity along a portion of the thick foam skin. Fresh wiring mingled with old, burnt-out parts that stank of singed hair and blood.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ethan tried to scurry away, but Matt seized him again, hauled him to his feet, and tugged him close so Ethan could feel Matt’s breath on his face as he giggled, “That’s exactly what I am!” He flung Ethan backwards, and even as the kid threw out his arms to catch himself, he tumbled back against Springtrap, falling into the open cavity.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Horrified, Ethan looked up at Matt as he cackled and sang, “Little lost children stuffed into suits, where no one will ever find them.” Then his voice dropped to a low growl, “I never get tired of seeing that.” He raised a hand, ready to snap and close the suit back in place with Ethan inside. “Oh, by the way! I’d try not to wiggle too much if I were you. The spring locks tend to get pretty loose as those suits age, and you do </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>want them snapping shut.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>With a snap of his fingers, the body groaned as it enclosed Ethan inside. Tucking his arms to his chest and beginning to hyperventilate, Ethan begged as the suit crushed down on him from all sides, “Please! Please let me out! Don’t do this - please!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Darkness surrounded him within the breathless confines of the suit, and Ethan would’ve screamed if he could get enough breath in his lungs to do it. The world beyond the animatronic spring locks was muffled, but he swore he heard a loud thud. The next moment a crowbar forced itself between the plates of Springtrap’s chest cavity. It only narrowly missed skewering Ethan’s head. The crowbar twisted, stopping the plates from closing entirely, and a pair of dark brown eyes appeared in the thin opening, blood trickling down his temple. “Ethan?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Y-yeah?” he gasped, a flicker of hope in his crushed chest.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The crowbar and the suit whined with mounting pressure as everything threatened to snap. But Nate kept his voice calm as he spoke, “It’s me. It’s Nate, and I’m going to get you out of there, okay? Just hang on!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Th-thank you!” Ethan squeezed his eyes shut to drown out some of the panic in his brain. He was going to die. Oh God, he was going to die in this thing. “But please - please hurry!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate adjusted his grip on the crowbar and blinked hard. He had a concussion - had gotten enough of them in his life to know what they felt like - but he had to concentrate. And he pulled, the metal straining. Ethan tried to push, too, from inside the animatronic, but Springtrap didn’t budge.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A large pair of arms wrapped around Nate from behind and yanked him away from Ethan as the kid screamed when the suit snapped closed on the crowbar. Nate hit the ground hard next to where Matthew had fallen after Nate had knocked him out. Hawkins towered over Nate and screamed, “What are you doing to my creation?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Your</span>
  </em>
  <span> creation?” Nate sputtered. “Wait, wait, wait.” Suddenly it all came together. The computers, the new wiring in old suits, Hawkins’ unfinished engineering degree. Nate blinked up at the demented teacher and sneered in disgust. “I’m starting to think you don’t know a </span>
  <em>
    <span>thing </span>
  </em>
  <span>about religion.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>With an enraged growl, Hawkins reached for Nate, and the young man dodged, staggered to his feet, and fell back against Springtrap, blinking stars away. “Ethan! The wiring! Pull out any new wiring you can see!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ethan shimmied around as much as he could inside the suit and spotted a tangle of fresh wiring above his head, but the way that his arms were pressed to his chest, it made it difficult to reach. “I - I’m trying!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate pushed himself away from the suit as Hawkins watched, waiting to attack. When he charged, Nate spun deftly to the side, slammed his elbow into the back of Hawkins’ neck, and caught him as he fell. One swift right hook to Hawkins’ jaw, and he was down for the count. Nate dropped him to the floor and scanned the room.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Out of breath, head still spinning from the concussion, Nate staggered back to Mark and grabbed the laptop. Then he somewhat gently kicked Mark a few times in the arm. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty, I need your help!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark groaned as he rolled over onto his back and stared, dazed and confused, up at Nate, who was holding the laptop in one arm and banging away at the unresponsive keys with the other. Growling, Nate tossed the useless computer aside as Mark finally sat up and looked around. “What the - Ethan?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate reached a hand out to him and pulled Mark to his feet just as Springtrap turned in their direction. From inside, Ethan screamed, “I’m not doing this! I’m not doing this, I swear!” Springtrap glared at them as it took the crowbar in its metal hands and tried to wrench it free. “Help me! Get me out of here, please!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark stared at the suit, eyes unfocused as the wound on the side of his head bled down his neck, staining his shirt, and Nate looked around for a solution, anything that might get the kid out of there. Mark stumbled forward a step as his addled brain started to put one and two together. “Ethan? Ethan!” He rushed at Springtrap, dodging an arm and pulling at the animatronic’s foam exterior. “Ethan!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Did you pull the wires?” Nate asked frantically as he raced to Mark’s aid, trying to hold back one animatronic arm as Mark pressed his fingers into any crevice in the robot’s armor. He could almost reach him, almost. Springtrap couldn’t move as quickly with someone inside, but it was still enough of a threat that Nate had to shove Mark’s head out of the way of getting hit again as he cried, “Ethan! Did you pull the wires?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“N-no! I can’t!” A sob worked its way out of Ethan’s chest, and he tried again to move just enough to reach some of the wires. But he couldn’t. He could hardly move an inch, and the more he tried, the more panicked he felt. He was certain the suit was getting smaller, the oxygen inside running out. “I can’t - I can’t reach them! Just get me out of this thing, please! I can’t breathe!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>As Springtrap became more agitated, one of the spring locks snapped, narrowly missing Ethan’s face. He screamed, and Nate pulled Mark back before his shaking and tearing could dislodge more of them. Then he saw her, standing in the corner, flickering in and out but waving her hands at him to get his attention. Nate gasped, “Charlie!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She cupped her hands over her heart, and when she slowly took them away again, Nate could see a familiar sigil burned into her chest. Afton’s symbol, the one on the floor in the basement, one of Matt’s repeated drawings, and - if he had to guess - the one that was somewhere inside this walking Iron Maiden with bunny ears. Nate drew his knife, and when he did, Mark grabbed the front of his shirt. “What are you doing?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate took Mark’s wrist, looking into his eyes and silently begging him to let him do this, to let him handle it, to trust him. Mark released his shirt and took a step back. Nate nodded. “Ethan - press into the back of the suit!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>From inside, they heard his small, trembling voice, “What?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Stay as far away from the opening as you can, understand me?” Nate called and twisted the iron blade in his hands. Mark covered his mouth, curled his fingers in his hair. Nate looked down at his brother lying unconscious on the floor and back up at the metal deathtrap. “Ethan, do you understand me?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes - yes,” he screamed finally. “I - oh God, oh God - just please get me out of here!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Just stay back!” Nate shouted as he sprang at the animatronic, knife flashing. He grabbed the crowbar, dodging one swing of the giant, metal arm, and with one, hard yank, he threw Springtrap off balance and plunged his knife into the heart of it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The iron blade split the sigil.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A wave of black magic and pure darkness exploded from the chest of the animatronic with the high-pitched wail of a child’s dying scream, and smoke filled the room. Nate and Mark were both knocked onto their backs, landing hard among the rubble already scattered around the room. As the smoke slowly cleared, Nate groaned and managed to get up on one elbow before he noticed the body of the Springtrap animatronic - eyes dead and lifeless - leaning over him. Only inches from his face, Nate could still see the kid inside.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He probably would have screamed in fright at the sight if he had any air in his lungs yet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Ethan?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Shakily, with tears in his voice, Ethan choked. “You have beautiful eyes.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate huffed, but it only made him curl in on himself coughing from the smoke in the air around them. He got up onto his knees and reached towards the suit. “Don’t worry, kiddo. We’re going to get you out of there.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark sat up, his head spinning so bad he couldn’t see straight. All he could make out was that awful suit, Nate pulling away pieces of it, and Mark crawled towards them on his hands and knees, barely able to hold himself up. With the two of them working together, it only took a few minutes to deconstruct the Golden Bonnie suit and finally, finally, pull the kid out. He collapsed, shaking and sobbing, in Mark’s arms, and the two of them knelt on the ground just hanging on for dear life.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate stared up into the hollow interior of the Springtrap suit and stared at the symbol with his knife through it. Then his gaze wandered back to his own partner, lying unconscious still with a growing welt on his head. Nate still felt the vibrations in his hands from when he’d hit Matt over the head, still felt sick to his stomach for it, but he couldn’t let Matt kill the kid. He’d never forgive himself, even if it was just some piece of Afton left over in him somehow.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then Nate came to a sickening realization. He pulled his knife from the animatronic and stood to his feet, crossing the room to Matthew - who had only just begun to stir - as both Mark and Ethan looked up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When Ethan saw the knife, saw Nate pause over Matt, he gasped, “No, Nate! Don’t-!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But it was too late. Before Matt could even react, Nate pinned his brother to the floor, took one of Matt’s hands, and cut across his palm with the iron blade. When he did, Matt’s body seized and shook, his insides glowing bright and flashing before everything went still again, and Nate fell back off of his brother. He stared at Matt, unable to breathe. The room was dead silent.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then Matt gasped for air, surging up as his eyes wandered until they found Nate’s face. He was confused but lucid. He was Matt, and if Nate was lucky - which he sometimes was - Matt wouldn’t remember a thing. He grabbed his brother in a hug as Matt blinked at his surroundings, too horrified for words.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>After scraping themselves up off the floor, the group finally dragged their feet out through the front doors and into the night air. Matt pushed Hawkins along as Mark all but carried Ethan out, and Nate kept one arm around Haylie as he sprayed something behind them from a little plastic bottle stashed in his back pocket. Mark noticed Nate empty the rest of the bottle in the mouth of the door before Nate handed off Haylie to him. Matt asked, “What are you doing?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate grabbed the lighter from his pocket, flicked it on, and tossed it over his shoulder without looking back as another Freddy’s went up in flames. While Mark and Ethan watched the place burn, along with some of their very expensive equipment and their footage, Nate trudged over to Matt’s side.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His brother eyed him up and down, looking like he’d been hit by a truck. “So, you going to tell me what happened back there?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Nate muttered, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Then he turned his gaze on the burning building, grateful that Matt didn’t have to live with the memories of what happened inside. Following his brother’s gaze, Matt looked back at the building, too, but he didn’t exactly feel grateful.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate wiped at some of the blood on his face and took off his glasses, frowning at them. “Broke my glasses again.” He hung them from the neck of his shirt with a sigh. “I hate animatronics.” Matt managed a cracked-lip smirk, shaking his head.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark sat down on the pavement a few yards from the burning building. He was still dazed from all the head trauma, so much so that he hardly recognized Ethan sitting down next to him. “All of our equipment was in there.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Mark took a deep breath. He rested one hand on Ethan’s shoulder and gave it a tight squeeze. “I don’t think we’re going to need it anymore.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Down the street, the boys heard sirens and saw the lights of a firetruck and police cars start to emerge through the buildings. Nate clicked his tongue. “Time to go!” And they snapped into action, grabbing up their supplies and heading for the back of the strip mall.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark staggered to his feet. “Wait-! I mean, you aren’t going to tell us what the hell just happened? What about us? What about </span>
  <em>
    <span>them</span>
  </em>
  <span>?” He gestured back to Haylie and Hawkins who were both basically unresponsive, curled up on the ground and stuck in their own worlds.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Matt grimaced and shook his head. “There’s nothing else we can do for them.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ethan managed, after a few failed attempts, to stand up, too. “So you’re just going to leave?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nate shrugged and shoved Matthew back a few more steps because those sirens were getting really close. “Follow us if you want. Otherwise you’ll have to deal with the cops, and in case you haven’t noticed, that’s not exactly our scene.” They took off then, full sprint, for the Firebird.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mark and Ethan looked at each other, the flames shadowing their faces as red and blue lights flashed on the horizon.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Be Sure to Like, Comment, and Subscribe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Glad you guys enjoyed sending in some prompts this weekend! I know Becca and I really enjoyed writing some one shots with these crazy kids, and we'll be sure to do something like that again soon for anyone who might've missed out (including me, since I was gone half the time). Hope you enjoy the final two chapters of this episode; as always, it's been so much fun to share it with you!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Caliente, Idaho<br/>April, 2011</p><p>In the quiet of the motel room, Matt slumped against the foot of his bed on the floor where he’d just finished wrapping his bleeding hand in thick, white bandages. He picked at them for a moment, staring emptily at the scratched-up phone lying on the floor between his legs, and then gathering his courage, he picked it up and dialed her number.</p><p>Stephanie answered almost immediately, breathless. “Matthew?”</p><p>He smiled, tears slipping down his cheeks as his chest shook. “Hey.”</p><p>Steph paused and listened, and she kept her voice calm, “Hey. Are you okay?”</p><p>Matt leaned his head back against the mattress, looked towards the bathroom door, and rubbed at the scar-tissue sigil underneath his collarbone. He didn’t answer.</p><p>Inside the bathroom, steam choked the air as the shower ran full blast, and Nate knelt in front of the toilet puking up what little was left in his stomach. He’d been at it a while, hair still wet and only dressed in a pair of sweatpants with a damp towel draped over his bare shoulders. Shower didn’t matter much when he was already covered in sweat again. Not to mention he couldn’t stop shivering as he flushed for what felt like the eightieth time and hauled himself to his feet.</p><p>At the sink, he ran cold water into his shaking hands and washed out his mouth, cleaned his face and hair again for good measure, careful of the large gash running across his temple caked in dried blood. He felt like he’d never get it all off, all the grime of Freddy’s. Reaching over, he turned off the shower finally and winced when he heard voices beyond the bathroom wall. It was only Matthew, and as Nate pressed his ear to the door, he could hear what he was saying, relaxing a little when he realized his brother had called Stephanie.</p><p>That was a good sign - had to be.</p><p>His gaze wandered back to the fogged mirror, to the faint reflection of himself covered in garish new bruises. Nate reached out a trembling finger and, in the condensation, drew a large circle around his head like a noose, two upturned circles over his own eyes, a wide crescent smile over his lips, and two streaks of tears falling down his face to his chin.</p><p>Some days, he couldn’t tell what was the mask and what was him anymore.</p><p>He blinked, his gaze shifting to the corner of the room, but Charlie wasn’t there.</p><p>Matt glanced up when the door to the bathroom finally opened again and Nate stepped out, towelling his hair dry as he stiffly moved for the bed. When Matt saw the massive new bruises decorating his little brother’s body, he jumped to his feet, swaying a little but still full of concern. “What happened?”</p><p>Nate’s attention snapped up to him, confused, and then he looked down at his chest. “Oh.” He wadded up the towel and tossed it into the corner before bending over - that hurt, a lot - and hauling his duffel bag onto the bed to fish around in it for a semi-fresh t-shirt. “Um, a fox jumped on me.”</p><p>Matt frowned at him.</p><p>After Nate managed to pull the Team Rocket t-shirt over his head - lifting his arms up was no picnic either - he looked up at Matt with a raised eyebrow. “You know, Mangle? Big metal fox? With two heads? The thing ate Balloon Boy like he was birthday cake. You seriously don’t remember that?” It was pretty epic, even if Nate did watch it from the floor with swimming double vision.</p><p>Matt rubbed gingerly at the goose egg on his head, hissing a bit as he did. “I told you. I remember getting there, meeting the guys, splitting up, saving Haylie, and seeing Hawkins, but,” Matt looked down at his injured hand and flexed it a few times, “he must’ve knocked me out or something, because everything after that is just gone.”</p><p>Nate wet his cracked lips. “All of it?”</p><p>Shrugging, Matt nodded his head, and when Nate checked his eyes, they still seemed to only have Matthew inside them. Even if they were a little foggy. “Yeah, until you woke me up when it was over. You said I cut my hand on something?”</p><p>Hope stirring in his chest, Nate masked his relief behind a nonchalant shrug, dropped his head for good measure, and tried to look like he was packing his bag. “That place is filled with old junk. You’ll probably get rabies or something.”</p><p>Matt staggered back to the kitchen where he filled up the coffee pot. His head was pounding, ears ringing slightly. Hawkins got him good with that crowbar. “You don’t get rabies from a cut. You get tetanus.”</p><p>In between wary, stolen glances at his brother, Nate finally relaxed a little with a smirk, “You mean the videogame?” Maybe they would be okay after all.</p><p>Popping the lid shut on the coffeemaker, Matt rolled his eyes - ow. “No, that’s Tetris,” he said with a chuckle. “Come on, your concussion isn’t that bad.” Though they certainly had enough head trauma to go around.</p><p>Nate must’ve zoned out a little then, caught up in the easy, repetitive motion of folding up shirts and stuffing them into his duffel bag because Matt appeared very suddenly beside him with a bottle of the headache medicine and a glass of water. Nate couldn’t help but flinch a little. Matt swallowed around the growing lump in his throat. “Sorry,” he whispered and handed over the medicine and water.</p><p>“‘S okay. Thanks,” Nate muttered back, his head still ducked.</p><p>Even though he knew Nate was anything but okay at the moment, Matthew went back to his bed to pack his own things, give him some room to breathe, and after a few minutes passed in comfortable silence, Nate finally asked, “So, the Religions guy, huh?”</p><p>Matt huffed lightly and stopped what he was doing. None of it really made sense. Maybe it was the goose egg on his head, or they were still missing pieces, but Matt just couldn’t quite get it all to add up. Though, there were one or two things he figured he understood for sure. “He said he was almost an engineer - computer engineer, mind you - probably around the time that those freaky new animatronics were being rolled out.”</p><p>He turned to Nate then, his gaze careful and a bit unsure. For some reason, he thought he remembered Hawkins calling him ‘Afton,’ though he wasn’t sure why. “He also worked some ‘minimum wage jobs,’ as he put it, after dropping out and before teaching, but failed to mention said job was working as a technician at your very own Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria.”</p><p>Nate glanced up, eyes wide. He hadn’t heard that detail before. Matt just shrugged. “Steph found his resume online, maybe just a bit too late.”</p><p>Nate nodded to himself, and then, frowning, he looked up again. “He was also Haylie’s teacher, at least one of them. He thought she was ‘super special’ or something? So he had to be the one that lured her back inside the restaurant and snatched her.”</p><p>“Well, he would be a person she trusted.” Matt rung a t-shirt in his hands as he thought about the way Hawkins looked at him in the restaurant, the way his eyes shone. Matt got that same sick-to-his-stomach feeling and brushed the memory away again. “And wiring up the whole building like he did, he could have tricked a hundred kids into thinking the place was really haunted, driving more and more to show up and ‘experience’ it until he got the right... candidate. For a guy who complained so much about ‘kids and their trends these days,’ he certainly understood how they worked.”</p><p>Nate grabbed one of the rolls of bandages Matt had left out, the bite mark on his arm still slowly oozing blood. He thought about what Matt said about tetanus and wondered if he’d ever once gotten a shot for it, certainly not in the last few years. “And being an old employee he would have known all the secrets to how Freddy’s worked, including the old hidden closet. But what was in it? Springtrap came from the Burbank location, right?”</p><p>His fingers got tangled in the bandages trying to secure them in place, and noticing his struggle, Matt slipped over to quickly help him tape down the gauze. He noted with a twinge of pain in his gut just how close those animatronic teeth had come to severing the artery in Nate’s wrist. But Nate just turned away, back to packing the last of his things and avoiding how torn up he was.</p><p>Then zipping up his own bag, Matt sat down on his bed and smoothed his good hand over the comforter as he thought about what Nate had said. “‘Springtrap’? A rare and unique collector’s item for a rare and unique collector. I’m guessing Balloon Boy was local, as well as whatever jumped on you. Maybe they’re whatever he found in the closet, since White Lawn certainly hadn’t yet.”</p><p>He went to grab his coffee from the pot the moment that it stopped brewing and came back to sit down again. “What I don’t get is why.” It was the one thing that had been bugging him, the one piece of the puzzle he couldn't fit into place. “Why would a perfectly respectable teacher turn against his own students, kidnap one of them, hide them in a Freddy’s location so not even the police could find them, and then, what? What was his goal?”</p><p>Nate couldn’t bring himself to look up at his brother. He felt a phantom touch along his cheek, breath on his neck, and winced at the memory, cramming down the feeling of panic that accompanied it. “I don’t know, but we can bet it was Afton. That’s really all the answer you need. Child killing cycle continues, I guess.” Swallowing, he finally looked up at Matt again, his breaths coming a little shallower than he’d like but his chest still aching with each one. “You really don’t remember anything?”</p><p>Mostly Matt just seemed unsatisfied. He wanted things to wrap up in a nice, neat bow, and that’s certainly not what he was getting here. But the more he thought about the moments before his blackout - “Mr. Afton,” Hawkin’s worshipful gaze, Haylie’s screams - the fuzzier those memories got. He shook his head. “I think I’d remember slicing my hand open.”</p><p>Nate nodded and, finished packing, dropped his duffel at the foot of his bed as he made his way to the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. The scent grounded him. The warmth even more so. Cradling it in his hands and sipping it slowly, he turned back to Matt. “Oh, by the way, you and I made a bet before it all went to hell, and now you owe me twenty bucks.”</p><p>Hearing a large vehicle pull up just outside, Matt went to the window, pulled back the curtain a little, and peeked out. “A bet huh? What for? I don’t remember that.” It was dark, but he could just make out the big, white van.</p><p>“So?” Nate said with a shrug. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”</p><p>Matt scoffed at him before looking back outside at the two approaching figures. “Oh great. The Disaster Duo found us.”</p><p>Nate poked out his bottom lip. “I thought that was <em>our</em> team name…”</p><p>When they knocked, Matt opened the door, Mark and Ethan staring wearily around the room. Matt flashed them both a shy smile and backed away from the door, allowing them to enter. With a quick first glance, they saw no animatronics, no crowbar-wielding religion teachers, and no party balloons of death, so the two of them slipped inside. Matt, checking to make sure they hadn’t been followed, shut the door behind them, and Nate settled back onto his bed with his mug of coffee, raising it towards them with a smirk.</p><p>“‘Sup snotwads!”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>To their credit, Mark and Ethan listened to Matt’s Power Point presentation on Hunting 101 without interrupting or making any of their usual asinine remarks. Listening as intently as a man with two growing lumps on his head could manage, Mark sat backwards in one of the chairs, his arms folded in front of him across the back of the chair and stared sourly at the floor. Ethan sat next to Nate on the bed with his legs crossed and a pillow hugged tight to his chest. When Matt was done, Nate glanced between the two of them, then at Matt, and back to Ethan.</p><p>The kid’s head was bowed over the pillow in his arms, a tear trailing down his cheek. Nate bumped shoulders with him. “What’s going on, short-stack? You look like someone ran over your dog.”</p><p>Ethan shook his head and brushed away the tear quickly. Nate gave him a gentle pat on the back before getting up and going to stand by his brother who was just handing over a mug of coffee to Mark. “So, you didn’t hurt Haylie,” the suspiciously quiet man said, though the statement still sounded somewhat like a question.</p><p>Matt rubbed his hands together, backing away from Mark a step when he saw the tense expression in the other younger man’s eyes. “No, it’s generally our policy not to hurt anyone.” He glanced towards Nate. “Well, anyone human.”</p><p>Ethan looked up at Matt suddenly, and the gesture wasn’t lost on Nate, who cleared his throat and gave the kid a long, hopefully-meaningful look. “Generally.”</p><p>After a moment, Ethan nodded to Nate and looked down, dropping his arms to his side in a huff. “So, everyone doing that stupid challenge... this isn’t going to happen to them, is it?” His gaze shifted up slowly then, first to Nate and then to Matt.</p><p>“Not exactly, no,” Matt assured him. “But if you go messing with these kinds of things, you never really know what you're going to get.”</p><p>“But the animatronics trying to eat us alive? People losing their minds? Memory loss?” Nate shrugged his shoulders and swept his drying hair back from his face. “That’s typically our brand of crazy.”</p><p>Matt bit his lip and smoothed the palms of his hands over his jeans. “<em>That’s</em> generally what we do.”</p><p>Ethan sat up a little straighter then, a certain very dangerous light in his eyes that Nate had seen before in others - others who usually ended up very dead. “You two willingly find things like that - ghosts, and monsters, and evil spirits and all that - to stop them? So they don’t hurt anyone else? Stupid people like us?” He sagged a little again, and Mark finally looked up from the floor like he could sense Ethan’s train of thought, too.</p><p>Hesitantly, Nate nodded. “Yeah, it’s kinda the family business.”</p><p>“You two are brothers?” Mark asked in a tone like he was starting to put a few things together all of a sudden - the way they seemed to communicate wordlessly and the way Nate was still protecting Matt from what really happened back in the restaurant.</p><p>Matt looked to Nate, a small smile creeping across his lips. “Step-brothers since we were kids. I’m a little out of practice with all this stuff, but I’ve got Nate.” He clapped a hand on Nate’s shoulder and didn’t notice the way Nate shivered. “He’s the expert.”</p><p>Playing off the nervous reaction and deflecting his brother’s praise at once, Nate shrugged off Matt’s touch and made a face.</p><p>“And what about Haylie?” Everyone’s attention turned to Ethan again, and for the first time since the boys showed up at the motel room, he seemed to have gotten his curious spark back. “And her teacher? What about them?”</p><p>Matt raised an eyebrow. “What about them?”</p><p>Ethan twisted his hands together, fingers intertwining. “Well, aren’t you going to tell them anything? About… <em>this</em>?”</p><p>Nate rubbed at the back of his neck. He was honestly too exhausted to be having this conversation, and he knew that the two of them had to be worn-out, too. Not to mention that he still wasn’t certain that Mark was completely with them as he continued to blink rapidly every few seconds as if to clear his head. “What can we say? You two know the truth now. Do you feel any better about it? Feel like you can go on and live a normal life? Free from paranoia and fear and normal, everyday terror?”</p><p>Rubbing at his temples, Matt settled down onto the corner of his bed when he noticed his phone light up. “We tend to reason that letting people believe in freak accidents and mental breakdowns leaves them happier in the long run.” A message from Stephanie, a picture of her and Skip - Matt smiled. “Instead of constantly wondering what’s in the dark, or who’s really a monster.” Then he swept his finger over the phone screen, over Stephanie’s face, a sour note in his voice.</p><p>Mark and Ethan both watched Matt while he focused on the picture that Steph sent him, and Nate stepped into their line of sight, shooting them both warning glares. Nate had taken care of Afton, and if it meant protecting his brother, he’d find a way to silence Mark and Ethan, too. Sensing that resolve, they both looked away again and sank back into their own worlds. Then after a bit, Mark reached up to rub the side of his face that wasn’t covered in cuts and bruises from being back-handed by Mangle. “But you two know what you know the truth, and you do this... How are you still alive?”</p><p>That got a dry laugh out of Nate. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a painful coughing fit, and he doubled over and clutched his sides, as the coughing tore through him. Matt got up quickly from the bed to run to the kitchen and get his brother a glass of water. Ethan’s shoulder’s curled in further, watching Nate struggle to breathe.</p><p>“We know a lot of good people who do what we do and aren’t alive anymore because of it.” Matt brushed the tips of his fingers over the sigil on his chest again as he brought the glass back to Nate. “And… it takes its toll.” He rubbed a hand a hand up and down his brother’s back to soothe him.</p><p>Unnerved at the touch, Nate shut his eyes and grit his teeth as he took the glass.</p><p>Matt smiled ruefully. “It’s a combination of skill, hard work, and a partner you trust.”</p><p>Ethan perked up again and looked to Mark. “We’ve got that.”</p><p>Choking on his water, Nate wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and shook his head. There it was - Car Number One in the Train of Thought headed straight to hell. “No, no, you two have big Dumbass Energy and no freaking clue about literally anything outside of ad-rev and monetization. That’s what you’ve got.”</p><p>“Hey!” Mark said like he’d only just come back to life, and he pointed a finger at Nate. “That’s a beast of its own.”</p><p>Nate set the glass of water aside, trying not to sound as angry as he felt because he’d heard this before, people thinking that anyone could do their job with enough spunk and a few bullets. “My dad has been training me to do this since I was seven. I’ve been teaching Matt everything I know, but again, my dad still started it with him when he was younger, too.”</p><p>“Unfortunately,” Matt muttered under his breath. Nate dropped his gaze again.</p><p>Ethan pushed the pillow out of his lap and set his feet on the floor, resting his hands on his knees. “So we just have to train really hard!”</p><p>“Ethan-” Mark started.</p><p>“No,” Nate barked, standing to his feet a bit unsteady but with enough cold determination in his eyes to keep him going. “You stay the hell away. This crap ruins your life. It ruins your friends, your family, your sanity, your basic instincts to run <em>away</em> from the danger instead of towards it. You live the rest of your life paranoid out of your mind.”</p><p>He dialed back the anger a little when he saw Ethan’s gaze quickly switch to the floor. He really didn’t want to scare the kid - or maybe he did, only so he didn’t end up dead. But it also made him sound a lot like his dad, too much for his taste. So Nate cleared his throat, lowering his head and his volume, “Just - don’t start down this path. There’s <em>no</em> getting back out.”</p><p>Matt gave his brother an appraising glance before he smiled gently to Ethan, his hands fidgeting. “He’s right. It’s tempting to try to be a hero, to see something that makes you afraid, to see us surviving it, and think, ‘I can do that too,’ but you can’t.” Feeling cold suddenly, Matt rubbed his hands up his arms and frowned down at the floor. “And even if you try, you’ll regret it.”</p><p>Ethan shifted. “But-”</p><p>“Ethan.” And the kid looked over at Mark as he sighed. “They’re right.”</p><p>Nate blinked up at Mark. “Maybe it’s the double-whammy concussion, but did you just say something… smart?”</p><p>Mark fluffed his hair in frustration, and the front of it fell across his forehead. “Well you don't have to be a total smartass about it, but-” He looked back to the kid again, pleading. “Ethan, we can’t do this. We’re not cut out for it. We just do stupid things and post it online for people to laugh at. But never dangerous stuff, never life and death.”</p><p>He gripped the back of the chair and tilted his head towards Ethan, both eyebrows raising as he asked, “Do you want to hold someone’s life in your hands one day? Do you want to be responsible for that? Either being the one responsible for them living another day, or being the one to have to cut something’s head off? Something that probably looks human?”</p><p>Ethan went quiet then. It felt like the reasonable conclusion, he thought, to learn about something like this and want to help. How could he go back to a normal life knowing stuff like this was out there? And he’d much rather be part of the solution than just wait around for something bad to happen, but he couldn’t argue with Mark. The idea of holding someone’s life in his hands - that terrified him even more than being shoved in that stupid animatronic suit.</p><p>Or maybe those two were about the same.</p><p>Slapping his knees, Mark stood up, sore, and exhausted, and ready to pass out for a week at the very least. He stretched out his stiff muscles before gesturing towards Matt and Nate somewhat awkwardly. “Frankly, I’d love to offer you a burger, or a drink, but I’m allergic to alcohol and we’re both broke.”</p><p>Nate gawked at Mark. “You’re allergic to alcohol? How is your life worth living?”</p><p>Mark chuckled good-naturedly, but Matt’s gaze snapped to Nate, deeply concerned since John’s alcoholism had always been enough reason for Nate to adamantly swear off drinking, at least six years ago it had. But Matt sighed and shook his head. After everything they’d been through, maybe that was a red flag for another day…</p><p>Reluctantly, Ethan got up and stretched, too. As he stood next to Mark, the older vlogger was reminded, not for the first time that day, just how young Ethan was, and he’d dragged him into this. That certainly wasn’t going to haunt his nightmares. But Ethan just sighed and plastered on another smile. He was a trooper. “Um, I guess - I don’t know - be safe?”</p><p>“Not likely,” Nate said even though he did manage another thin smile himself. “But thanks.” They really weren’t so bad, he thought to himself, at least when they weren’t dumping laundry on his head anyway.</p><p>Ethan looked to Matt, nodding a little and waving to him, before he turned back to Mark. As they left the room, Matt stood in the doorway, twisting his fingers together and watching them go. When they had reached the Barrel, he stepped out, closed the door behind him, and ran after them suddenly.</p><p>“Hey, guys?” They turned to him as he stepped closer, his voice low, “Whatever went down back at Freddy’s, nothing happened to Nate, right?”</p><p>They frowned at him and then at each other, swapping silent words through their glances before Mark turned back to Matt. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything?”</p><p>Matt smiled. His hands kept fidgeting self-consciously. “No, I don’t remember. That’s why I’m asking.” He swallowed the lump in his throat and swept a hand through his hair. “Look, as hard as it is to believe, considering how useless I probably seem to the both of you, Nate’s my little brother. I may be the way under-qualified hunter here, but it’s my job to look after him.”</p><p>Finally, Matt met their eyes, Mark’s eyes specifically because Matt had a feeling he would understand. “It’s my job to keep him safe. But if anything else happened while I was out that I should know about, he’s not going to tell me just based on principle. He’s... stubborn that way.”</p><p>Mark thought of the change he’d seen in Matt’s whole personality, the look in Matt’s eyes as he’d stood over them, chose his victim, and trapped Ethan in that awful suit. But Mark saw none of that in him now, so maybe whatever Nate had done had worked.</p><p>Ethan, naive as he could be sometimes, was also the most compassionate kid Mark had ever known, and he smiled at Matt, shaking his head. “No, I believe it. You being a big brother.” Ethan looked up at Mark then, communicating silently. “You didn’t miss anything. I think you’ll both be okay.”</p><p>Mark grinned and ruffled the back of Ethan’s hair a bit. Maybe they weren’t hunters, but they were still a team.</p><p>Matt looked down at his feet, his fingers still twisting, twisting, twisting together. “Okay. Thank you, both of you.” He smiled up at them and rubbed his thumb along the bandages around his hand. “And good luck to you. Really, we wish you the best. Nate’s a little rough around the edges, I know, but you seem like pretty okay dudes. I think deep down, he likes you.”</p><p>“Oh, we actually prefer handsome and/or beautiful dudes,” Mark added with a smirk, mischief in his eyes. “For the record.”</p><p>Matt chuckled, waggling a finger at Mark. “I’ll try to keep that in mind in case we cross paths again.”</p><p>“Yeah, don’t take this the wrong way,” Ethan said with a well-meaning giggle, “but I really hope we don’t.”</p><p>Honestly, Matt couldn’t blame him. He couldn’t imagine anyone would really want to relive the memories made while fighting serial killers and vengeful ghosts in a Freddy’s. He certainly didn’t want to, but he didn’t have much of a choice.</p><p>He watched them climb back into the Barrel, his hands fretting over the hem of his shirt.</p><p>“Hey guys,” Matt called, and they both peered out the windows to him, “I really hope I don’t see either of you again, and I mean that in the same way. Please, don’t run off and do something stupid, or worse, heroic.” The memory of dank, moldy air in a concrete basement sent shivers up his skin. “Promise me you won’t, or at least promise each other.”</p><p>They smiled, a perfect mirror image of the other.</p><p>“We promise,” Mark’s eyes glinted. “And that’s a Markiplier Promise!”</p><p>Though he wasn’t exactly reassured, Matt smiled and stepped away from the large van as it started up.</p><p>Ethan leaned out the passenger side window as the van pulled out of the parking spot, and he waved to Matt. “See you around!”</p><p>“Buh-bye,” Mark called, and they backed out, heading back for the road.</p><p>Matt turned back to head inside again, when he heard, “Stay Cranky!” and Ethan nearly fell out of the window waving. Matt, laughing, waved back to him again until they’d disappeared. His hand instinctively went to scar under his shirt again as he watched the road, eyes empty. Then he turned and went back inside the motel with a deep sigh.</p><p>When he did, Nate was crouched on his bed, having a staring contest with Mr. Spikes. Matt stopped in the doorway, smiling in confusion at his brother. “Wh-what are you doing exactly?”</p><p>Nate wiggled his fingers without looking up from Mr. Spikes. “Resisting the urge to put this lamp in my duffel bag.” He frowned up at Matt. “Would you be cool with being an accessory to larceny?”</p><p>“You are not stealing a cactus-shaped lamp on my watch, punk,” Matt teased him as he dropped onto his bed with a sigh. “Think those two will listen to us and stay away from all this?”</p><p>Nate, still staring at the cactus, snorted and rolled his eyes. “I’d bet money the little one is Googling monsters right now. We’ll be lucky if we don’t have to pull a chupacabra off them in a month.”</p><p>Tucking his hands behind his head, Matt sighed contentedly. “Should probably get some sleep… if we can. Head out first thing in the morning.”</p><p>Nate slumped to the side, drawing his legs up onto the bed and slipping beneath the comforter. He reached forward to the lamp and pouted a little. “Goodnight, Mr. Spikes. It’s been nice knowing you.” Then he turned out the light, glanced towards the corner of the room - still no Charlie - and shut his eyes, hoping for sleep.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Epilogue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Los Angeles, California<br/>
April, 2011<br/>
Days Later</p><p>Nate stood at the entrance to the charred <em>Freddy Fazbear</em> restaurant. It still smoldered, curls of smoke rising into the gray sky like rotten souls fleeing through the debris. Ash covered the toes of Nate’s boots as he picked his way through what remained of the building, the ceiling caved in most places, the walls crumbling, the black and white tile floors no longer distinguishable.</p><p>The smoke coated his throat, burned his eyes.</p><p>As he pushed through to what was once the Main Party Room, faded sunlight drifted down to his soot-stained face through the open ceiling. The stage was covered in rubble and shattered glass, the walls on either side of him blackened but mostly intact. The light cut through motes of dust and ash, and the room reminded him of something like a post-apocalyptic cathedral. A place that once contained so much life but was now nothing more than an empty tomb.</p><p>Nate wasn’t sure why he was there, what he was searching for, only that something was missing, and he felt he had to find it. He drew closer to the stage, to the pile of debris stacked as high as a pulpit, menacing and bleak. At first, he thought he should go, get back into his car, and go home. But what home?</p><p>He hadn’t had one of those in a very long time.</p><p>Then something caught his eye among the shattered pieces of wood, twisted metal, and crumbling drywall - a movement, shifting, dust falling to the floor. He thought he saw the curve of a white mask, a streak of blue, a rosy red cheek, and as much as the animatronics made his blood run cold - the mere sound of metal on metal sending him into a panic so deep he felt he’d never escape -  this face seemed almost comforting.</p><p>Until a metal hand shot out of the pile of trash to grab at his throat. Nate stumbled backwards, a scream shaking the remaining ceiling above his head which showered him in white dust. He tried to flee back the way that he came only for two more animatronics to step into his path, cutting off his exit.</p><p>“No, no, no, no,” he gasped and fell back into a pair of metal arms that wrapped around him tight, crushing his chest and making it impossible to breathe. Nate clawed at them wildly. His fingernails broke against the metal plating, but it was no use.</p><p>They forced him back towards the heaping pile and then down onto his knees in front of it as the spindly animatronic unearthed itself and stood to its full height, at least seven feet tall with gaping black holes for its eyes and a wide smile. In its hand it held a Freddy’s mask, the interior spiked with springlocks and exposed wires. The closer this humanlike animatronic came, it held out the mask to Nate like an invitation.</p><p>Or a demand.</p><p>But Nate shook his head, tired to rise to his feet to flee, but the metal hands holding him down wouldn’t let him move an inch.</p><p>“No!” he pleaded, shaking and leaning away from the mask, “No, please!”</p><p>It came closer and closer, the metal rods and wires poised to gouge at his eyes, the skin of his cheeks. No matter how hard he fought and bucked and kicked, the animatronics held him down, one of them grabbing his hair to hold him in place as the voice of the tall animatronic soothed him, whispering in a calm, almost feminine voice, <em>“Don’t be afraid. This makes you one of us now.”</em></p><p>Nate screamed as the wires tore at his skin and eyes, and he bolted upright in the front seat of the Firebird, panting and clutching at his bruised chest. Then his fingers went to his face, his eyes, his hair. It was only a dream.</p><p>Nate looked to the passenger seat, for Matt, only to remember he’d left Matt at his apartment the day before, safe and happy with Stephanie and his cat. And Nate shifted his leather jacket where he’d been using it as a blanket, a flannel rolled up beneath his head as a pillow. The night beyond the Firebird’s windows was dark as pitch. The nearest town had to be miles away, along with the nearest distractions for Nate’s racing mind.</p><p>So he dug his phone out of his pocket, a few blessed bars and ten percent battery left, and he called Jonathan. The phone rang and rang, and for a moment Nate thought he wouldn’t answer before finally, he got a terse, <em>“What do you want?”</em></p><p>“Well, if I’d have known you were in such a stellar mood, Johnny, I would’ve just dropped by for a visit.”</p><p>He could hear Jonathan sigh. It was pretty late. Nate just forgot sometimes that other people actually managed to sleep through the night. Either way, when Jonathan answered, he sounded a little less gruff, <em>“Sorry, Nate. It’s been rough here the last few days. We’re so close to the nest I can taste it.”</em> He shuffled some things around on his end of the line and asked, <em>“But why did you call? Need something? You know I’m a little tied up.”</em></p><p>But Nate just shook his head. “No, nothing - nothing in particular, just…” His whole body shuddered at the memory of his nightmare. “Nothing, sorry that I bothered you. Have fun in Vegas for me.” Nate thought that maybe he heard Jonathan protest, but it was too late. He hung up his phone and tossed it somewhere in the backseat before shoving the flannel and his jacket into the passenger’s side and starting the car.</p><p>It wasn’t that long to the Roadhouse from where he was. If he didn’t stop, he’d make it before morning, and so he drove, leaving his nightmares in the dust.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Sunk into the futon, Matt stared at his laptop, his fingers steepled together as his eyes scanned the screen. Adjusting the headphones he was wearing and bobbing his head, Matt started taking notes again, filling up the final page of yet another legal pad and fishing under the futon for another one. Drawings surrounded his laptop on the surface of the coffee table, more of the sigils from the Idaho location. The sun rose through the window as Skip jumped onto the table, stepping all over Matt’s work.</p><p>“Skip,” Matt scolded softly, a smile tugging at his tired eyes, “you know you’re not supposed to be up here!”</p><p>Ignoring Matt, Skip headbutted the laptop screen as Matt continued to scroll through the results. Matt scratched behind the cat’s ears, and he selected another website to look through, rubbing his eyes with the other hand and blinking until he could see straight again. As he read, he idly rubbed at the scar beneath his collarbone.</p><p>A message on his phone pulled him from his thoughts, and Matt checked it - a selfie from Nate, of him and Ro. She was covering his cheek in kisses, typical Ro being overly affectionate, and he was glad to see Nate had made it to the Roadhouse in one piece. Sending a quick response, Matt looked up when he noticed his laptop screen glitch.</p><p>“What?” Matt hit the keyboard a couple times. “No, no, no! Come on!” He pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete, waited a moment until the screen flashed and came back. Only it was pulled up to another website, one he hadn’t meant to click on, and he was about to click away when he saw the symbol, the one scarred onto his chest, at the very top of the site. And there were more, more of the symbols, the ones he’d been looking for, all together in one place for the first time.</p><p>Matt pulled off his headphones and let them hang around his neck as he scanned the page, his hand covering his mouth.</p><p> </p><p>Hours later, Steph awoke to Skip hopping up in bed with her, walking over her to settle down in front of her face. Steph giggled and petted the cat. “Hey, buddy.” Glancing over her shoulder, Stephanie found the other side of the bed empty as usual. She sighed, pushed herself up, and got out of bed.</p><p>Her silk robe - cherry red, a gift from Ro - hung from a hook inside the closet, and she pulled it around her before slipping into the den where Matt was so deep in thought, so deep in his screen that he didn’t hear her enter. Fingers steepled like that, eyes glazed over - she wondered when he ever got sleep. Sighing, she kissed his temple, just under the fading welt hidden in his hair.</p><p>He seemed to come alive a little and reached up a hand to rest against her back. Steph leaned her cheek against the top of his head. “Good morning... You know, since you got this hunt out of the way, I figured you’d at least <em> try </em>to get some sleep.” She straightened up and massaged gently at his back, but he still didn’t look away from the screen. “Matthew?”</p><p>Her eyes fell on the laptop screen, and she read over his shoulder. Matt finally broke his pose and leaned back, his head resting against her shoulder. The more Steph read, she felt her blood run cold. “Oh - oh my God. This -”</p><p>Still avoiding looking up at her, Matt tugged down the collar of his t-shirt, and Steph gasped when she saw the scar, touched it lightly as she looked between it and the screen, trying to make sense of it all. She started to sit before Matt had moved over to make room for her, so she was half on top of him as she settled on the futon in shock.</p><p>Finally, after what felt like an hour, she wrapped her arms around him, and Matt returned the gesture, his hand brushing her hair as she, trembling, whispering, asked, “What are we going to do?”</p><p>Matt had fire in his eyes, and a cold, serrated edge in his voice. “We kill him. <em> All </em>of him.”</p>
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